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Social media manipulation is getting worse: as more governments use it to manipulate public opinion, it’s becoming a rising threat to democracy, according to a new report from the Oxford Internet Institute.

There’s nothing new about political parties and governments using propaganda, but the new normal includes toxic messaging that’s easy to spread on a global scale with the brawny new tools for targeting and amplification, they said.

According to the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project, the use of algorithms, automation, and big data to shape public opinion – i.e. computational propaganda – is becoming “a pervasive and ubiquitous part of everyday life.”

For its third annual report, the project examined what it calls “cyber troop” activity in 70 countries. Cyber troops is the collective term for government or political party actors that use social media to manipulate public opinion, harass dissidents, attack political opponents or spread polarizing messages meant to divide societies, among other things.

Over the past two years, there’s been a 150% increase in the number of countries using social media to launch manipulation campaigns, the project found.