The decades-long Colombian civil war nearly came to an official end with the 2016 Peace
Plebiscite, which was ultimately defeated in a narrow vote. This conflict has deeply divided
Colombian civil society, and non-political public figures have played a crucial role in
structuring debate on the topic. To understand the mechanisms underlying the influence of
members of civil society on political discussion, we performed a randomized experiment on
Colombian Twitter users shortly before this election. Sampling from a pool of subjects who�…