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 had been
frequently tweeting about the Plebiscite, we tweeted messages that encouraged
subjects to consider different aspects of the decision. We varied the identity (a
general, a scientist, and a priest) of the accounts we used and the content of
the messages we sent. We found little evidence that any of our interventions
were successful in persuading subjects to change their attitudes. However, we
show that our pro-Peace messages encouraged liberal Colombians to engage in
significantly more public deliberation on the subject.