27 November 2025
Inside Capture the Narrative: how students learned to recognise AI-powered influence
What happens when the cyber security problem is not a vulnerable server, but a social-media feed filled with AI-generated content?
A new UNSW Newsroom feature goes inside Capture the Narrative, the experimental competition that challenged university students to explore exactly that question.
Inspired by traditional cyber security capture-the-flag competitions, Capture the Narrative placed participants inside a fictional online society built around a simulated presidential election.
Instead of exploiting software vulnerabilities, teams built automated social-media accounts and competed for influence. Thousands of AI-driven simulated citizens responded to what appeared in their feeds, allowing the organisers to observe how different strategies affected attention, opinion and ultimately voting behaviour.
The competition produced some striking lessons.
Teams discovered the importance of timing and coordinated amplification. They found that emotional and negative content could attract attention quickly. Some developed sophisticated techniques for identifying and targeting potentially persuadable voters. Others found that sheer volume could be remarkably effective when platform incentives rewarded engagement.
Those observations are important because the underlying challenge is no longer hypothetical. Generative AI makes it increasingly inexpensive to create convincing text, images and online personas at scale.
The purpose of Capture the Narrative is not to promote these techniques, but to make their operation visible.
Cyber literacy increasingly means understanding not only whether an individual piece of content is true or false, but why it is appearing in front of us, who or what may be amplifying it, and what behaviour the platform itself rewards.
The UNSW Newsroom feature explores the competition, its winning strategies and what its organisers learned from the first year.