Authoritarian countries such as Russia and China have received a great deal of attention for trying to control and distort the spread of information through "fake news" and censorship.
authoritarian governments might also use subtle tactics of media manipulation that are much harder to detect, like flooding communication channels with irrelevant information or highlighting particular viewpoints of an event to distract public attention (Rozenas and Stukal, Forthcoming;Munger et al., 2018;King et al., 2017).