War Game Exercise Demonstrates How Social Media Manipulation Works

The article describes UNSW's "Capture the Narrative," a four-week multiplayer wargame in which students built AI-driven bots on a bespoke social platform (Legit Social) to influence a simulated election; the exercise shifted votes by 1.8 percentage points and revealed practical influence techniques—adaptive spam, sentiment-based microtargeting, and closed-loop content tuning—demonstrating how AI-generated content can be used at scale and underscoring the need for platform detection, policy, and public education.