Yep, pretty much. The great thing about this belief is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enough years of stories in the media about elections being control

Yep, pretty much. The great thing about this belief is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enough years of stories in the media about elections being controlled by Twitter bots and people in the government-NGO-complex start to believe it must be true because why would all these respectable media outlets and academics mislead them? Then they start to think, gosh our political opponents are awful and it'd be terrible if they came to power by manipulating people. We'd better do it first! So now what you're seeing is actual attempts to use this tactic by people who have apparently read claims that it works. Because there's no direct evidence that it works, the existence of such schemes is itself held up as evidence that it works because otherwise why would such clever people try it? It's turtles all the way down.