“…Second, we present a theoretically informed method for the detection of a disinformation campaign. We argue that past research's predominant focus on automated accounts, famously known as "social bots", (see Howard & Kollanyi, 2016;Varol, Ferrara, Davis, Menczer, & Flammini, 2017) misses its target since reports on recent astroturfing campaigns suggest that they are often at least partially run by actual humans (so-called "cyborgs": Chu, Gianvecchio, Wang, & Jajodia, 2012), which may shield the accounts from detection strategies focused on automated behavior (Grimme, Assenmacher, & Adam, 2018). Using bot detection to study astroturfing betrays a fundamental conceptual mismatch: bots are one tool that can be used in an astroturfing campaign, but not all bots are part of it, and reversely, not all astroturfing accounts are bots.…”