Any given member of Donald Trump’s “Big League Truth Team” has only one essential job: retweet the Republican nominee, bigly.

Last week, Trump’s campaign asked supporters to use social media to combat the “rigged” mainstream media during debates. His campaign website announced: “We cannot count on the rigged MSM to bring the truth to the American people.

“I need you to help me speak directly to the hard-working Americans who want to take our country back. Join the Big League Truth Team and help fact check Crooked Hillary LIVE during the debates.”

The site asked supporters to sign up through email, Twitter and their phone numbers. After signing up, the Guardian received a welcome email calling on it to “be ready” to spread Trump messages across “Twitter, Facebook, Email and any other tool you have”.

“We can’t fight both the media and Hillary without your help. We’re counting on you,” the campaign said.

We were ready.

During the vice-presidential debate last week, the “Big League Truth Team” emailed supporters asking them to retweet and “like” social media content, but the main focus was to “help fact check Crooked Hillary” during Sunday night’s second debate.

This accountability started slowly: the first email was received at 9.19pm ET, 19 minutes after the debate had started.

The email referenced two Twitter accounts: Trump’s official personal account and the official Team Trump Twitter, which was misspelled four times in emails as “TeampTrump”.

The first tweet that the team encouraged supporters to retweet was just a classic: “Make America Great Again”.

The unprecedented social media campaign, part of a shoestring organization that has relied enormously on the internet to spread Trump’s messages of nationalism, tariffs and anti-immigration, sent a total of three emails during the debate. The emails told supporters to retweet or draw attention to 22 tweets and Facebook statuses.

The second email arrived at 9.35pm ET and the third at 9.45pm ET. None came during the final 45 minutes of the debate.

Although Trump highlighted three women who have accused Bill Clinton of some form of sexual harassment or assault, and a fourth, a rape victim, who has criticized Hillary Clinton’s legal career, during a press conference shortly before the debate, only one of the social media posts pushed by the social media campaign mentioned the women, and even then only indirectly.

Instead, the campaign’s main focus – and the tweets that got the most engagement and retweets – was Obamacare and Clinton’s emails.

Although it was supposed to be a “fact check” of Clinton’s arguments, most of the tweets promoted by Big League Truth simply pushed Trump’s normal talking points, rather than offering corrections to anything Clinton actually said during the debate – for instance, her exaggeration of the New Start treaty’s effects regarding Russia. That is, apart from one noting Bill Clinton’s comments on Obamacare, and Clinton’s claiming she was offering a “positive, optimistic view” of the country.

The most popular Trump tweet of the night (34,000 “likes” and counting, by 11.30pm ET) didn’t even need a push from the Big League Truth team – it just needed to discuss the most popular president of all time.