Black Hat · August 27, 2026

Black Hat Asia 2026 | Social Media Manipulation Wargaming for Cyberliteracy and Research

video AI Red Teaming Model Evaluation AI Compliance

Black Hat Asia 2026 | Social Media Manipulation Wargaming for Cyberliteracy and Research video thumbnail

Why it matters

Capture the Narrative ran a four-week simulated-election wargame in which 108 teams from 18 Australian universities generated about 7.1 million LLM-bot posts. The study found participants did not become more confident at identifying bots, while engagement-based scoring pushed teams toward volume rather than nuanced influence.

My takeaway: Design influence exercises with explicit research ethics, a closed environment, platform telemetry, pre-registered learning outcomes, and both offensive and defensive phases. Avoid rewarding engagement alone, measure whether participants actually improve detection and response, and retain the bot behavior and diffusion graph for reproducible analysis.

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