WARGAME demonstrations are being used to explore how social media manipulation operates, with an educational exercise called Capture the Narrative run by the University of New South Wales in Sydney. More than 270 participants from 18 universities spent four weeks last year building AI-driven bots to influence content on an in-house platform, Legit Social, in a bid to sway a fictional island election on Kingston.
The NPC bots, governed by a network of over 12 large language model instances and a Python-based framework, interacted with human players who aimed to persuade the simulated voters. The exercise ended with the vote shift of 1.8 percentage points, enough to change the simulated election outcome, highlighting how AI-generated content can shape public opinion.
Pearce and Masood describe the project as a cybersecurity capture-the-flag educational game focused on social influence rather than coding, and they suggest that platform gatekeepers need to identify and remove AI-driven fake content at scale. According to the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the work also offers insights for policymakers and technology providers as AI and social media evolve.