“…Third, we contribute to the debate on disinformation by measuring the impact of such a campaign on Twitter (Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018). Disinformation might be especially detrimental for democratic processes given the increasingly central role of social media in political communication (Bode, Hanna, Yang, & Shah, 2015;Jungherr, 2016;Stier, Bleier, Lietz, & Strohmaier, 2018;Thorson & Wells, 2016;Vaccari, 2017). We argue that the NIS campaign was, in many ways, a best-case scenario for an astroturfing campaign aimed at swaying public opinion: The campaign had considerable resources and professional manpower at its disposal and targeted an unsuspecting and politically polarized audience.…”