GoKawiilThe 1983 film "WarGames" demonstrated how a teenage hacker could bring the world to the brink of nuclear war by thinking he was playing a game while actually manipulating military systems in real time. These days, however, manipulation of world events via malicious activity is often a game of technology-driven online influence rather than actual physical weapons, though the stakes can be equally as high.
To explore how this manipulation via social media potentially can sway real-world events, a university in Australia had an idea: Stage a multiplayer wargame that uses artificial intelligence (AI)-driven bots to manipulate content while engaging with users on social media to see how far the pendulum of "public" opinion can swing through online interaction alone.
Called "Capture the Narrative" and hosted by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, more than 270 participants from 18 universities throughout Australia spent a four-week period last year trying to manipulate an in-house social media platform called Legit Social. The goal of the game was to turn a simulated election in a fictional island in the South Pacific called "Kingston" in favor of one political candidate over another, with players creating bots aiming to promote content to favor one or the other.
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The ultimate goal of creating such a competition — the work of Hammond Pearce and Rahat Masood, senior lecturers in the UNSW School of Computer Science — was to create an effective "cybersecurity capture-the-flag educational game" for computer science students that focused on social influence rather than traditional coding practices, Pearce tells Dark Reading.
"I wanted to have a platform where students could learn about AI misinformation online by interacting with, generating, and attempting to detect such influence," he says. Pearce will host a session at Black Hat Asia 2026 to discuss the outcome of the game, the lessons it has for how AI-generated fake content on social media can exert influence in the public space, and what technology stakeholders can do about it.
Fake Election, Real-World Inspiration
The result of the competition — which ended up shifting the vote 1.8 percentage points, enough to change the simulated election outcome — has relevance for technology industry as well, particularly those companies that control the content being disseminated via social media, Pearce says.
In fact, he says the game's creators were inspired by real-world instances of AI bots attempting to exert election or policy influence. One was a case of attempted election interference in Australia, where there was evidence that a pro-Russia operation attempted to poison AI chatbots with propaganda ahead of the 2025 federal election.
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