15 January 2026
Can AI bots swing an election? What Capture the Narrative revealed
How much influence can small teams equipped with readily available generative AI have over an online information environment?
The results of Capture the Narrative suggest the answer deserves serious attention.
Writing in The Conversation, DLCL Managing Director Hammond Pearce, collaborator Alexandra Vassar and Director Rahat Masood examine the results of the first Capture the Narrative social-media wargame and what they may tell us about the changing economics of online influence.
The four-week competition brought together teams from 18 Australian universities. Participants created AI-powered bots to campaign for opposing candidates inside a fictional presidential election, while thousands of simulated citizens read, reacted to and were influenced by the resulting content.
By the end of the exercise, competitor bots had generated millions of posts and more than half of the content appearing on the simulated platform.
Most strikingly, the researchers compared the final election with a simulation run without competitor interference. The difference was enough to reverse the winning candidate — a 1.78 percentage-point swing.
That does not mean a simulated election can be translated directly into claims about a real electorate. But it demonstrates something important: with consumer-grade tools, comparatively small groups can now generate, coordinate and test persuasive content at a scale that would previously have demanded far greater resources.
The exercise also highlighted a second problem.
As automated accounts become more convincing, the challenge is not simply that people may believe something false. Persistent uncertainty over who and what is genuine can undermine confidence in authentic information as well.
This is why cyber literacy must evolve alongside the technology.
Learning to check sources remains important, but citizens increasingly need to understand automated amplification, artificial consensus, emotional manipulation and the incentives built into online platforms.
Capture the Narrative was designed to make those invisible mechanisms visible.