  Social media platforms are a key ground of information consumption and
dissemination. Key figures like politicians, celebrities and activists have
leveraged on its wide user base for strategic communication. Strategic
communications, or StratCom, is the deliberate act of information creation and
distribution. Its techniques are used by these key figures for establishing
their brand and amplifying their messages. Automated scripts are used on top of
personal touches to quickly and effectively perform these tasks. The
combination of automation and manual online posting creates a Cyborg social
media profile, which is a hybrid between bot and human. In this study, we
establish a quantitative definition for a Cyborg account, which is an account
that are detected as bots in one time window, and identified as humans in
another. This definition makes use of frequent changes of bot classification
labels and large differences in bot likelihood scores to identify Cyborgs. We
perform a large-scale analysis across over 3.1 million users from Twitter
collected from two key events, the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and 2020 US
Elections. We extract Cyborgs from two datasets and employ tools from network
science, natural language processing and manual annotation to characterize
Cyborg accounts. Our analyses identify Cyborg accounts are mostly constructed
for strategic communication uses, have a strong duality in their bot/human
classification and are tactically positioned in the social media network,
aiding these accounts to promote their desired content. Cyborgs are also
discovered to have long online lives, indicating their ability to evade bot
detectors, or the graciousness of platforms to allow their operations.
