Table 1: Organizational Form and Prevalence of Social Media Manipulation in Austria Initial Government Politicians Private Contractors Civil Society Citizens & Report Agencies & Parties Organizations Influencers x x Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. Strategies, Tools, and Techniques During the presidential and federal elections in 2016 and 2017, negative comments about competing parties were disseminated through Facebook and Twitter without identifying their own affiliations. For example, the SPÖ’s advisor at the time, Tal Silberstein, created two Facebook pages in October 2016 specifically to mock and undermine now chancellor Kurz’s campaign. The SPÖ stopped working with Silberstein after he was accused of money laundering in his home country Israel (Kozlowska, 2017). While most Austrian parties have engaged in spreading narratives and information that attack rivals and support their own position, Chancellor Kurz has taken such actions outside of campaign times: Austrian newspaper Kontrast.at (2020) put together all instances in which Kurz has made false claims since his rise to power, and their list contains a total of twenty-eight instances where he was caught essentially lying. Moreover, Kurz’s ÖVP was embroiled in a major scandal relating back to underhanded campaigning techniques employed in 2017 when suspicions arose that they were sharing the personal data of political opponents and other private citizens with the Austrian Intelligence Services. Reports say that the information that was exchanged had been collected over years and may have significantly influenced the campaign strategy of the ÖVP (Pühringer, 2019). The Ibiza Affair also saw new tools and strategies being deployed to influence voters: in the tapes analysed and published by Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung, the now ex-vice-chancellor and ex-chairman of the FPÖ (governing in coalition with the ÖVP) considered how controlling one of the biggest tabloid papers in Austria, Kronen Zeitung, could help control any political narratives and essentially build a media landscape similar to that in operation in Hungary, with outlets working as pro-government propaganda machines (Al-Serori et al., n.d.; Schuetze, 2019; Spiegel Politik, 2019). Given the countries messy campaigning history and increasing amounts of trolling and hate speech online, demand to fight this development has grown over the past year. During a summit in April 2019, the ÖVP drafted a law dubbed the “digital anonymity ban” as it would require Austrians to provide a full name and address when signing up to platforms with more than 100,000 registered users and an annual revenue of over €500,000. Should they fail to do so they would risk receiving fines that could run into the millions according to reports by Der Standard (Al-Youssef, 2019). Critics have highlighted that the law would penalise the wrong platforms, as right-wing forums such as unzensuiert.at would not be affected or could simply move outside the country to avoid any penalty. Some observers pointed out that the ban could be a political move to undermine Der Standard, as the liberal newspaper functions as a lively political forum (Meaker, 2019). The law was supposed to come into effect in the beginning of 2020, however, the Ibiza Affair put a hold on that. Even though Kurz managed to win the federal elections in September 2019, as of now it remains to be seen whether it will be implemented. 24