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1 January 2021

Social Media Manipulation Report 2020


Antagonists, from foreign governments to terror groups, anti-democratic groups, and commercial companies, continually seek to manipulate public debate through the use of coordinated social media manipulation campaigns. These groups rely on fake accounts and inauthentic behaviour to undermine online conversations, causing online and offline harm to both society and individuals. As a testament to the continued interest of antagonists and opportunists alike to manipulate social media, a string of social media companies, researchers, intelligence services, and interest groups have detailed attempts to manipulate social media conversations during the past year. Therefore, it continues to be essential to evaluate whether the social media companies are living up to their commitments to counter misuse of their platforms. In an attempt to contribute to the evaluation of social media platforms, we re-ran our ground-breaking experiment to assess their ability to counter the malicious use of their services. This year we spent significant effort to improve our methodology further, and we also added a fifth social media platform, TikTok, to our experiment.

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