Signal Australian "Capture the Narrative" Wargame Finds Misinformation Education Didn't Boost Bot-Spotting Confidence

Summary

Researchers ran "Capture the Narrative," a four-week competition across 18 Australian universities in which 108 student teams built LLM-powered bots to influence a simulated election populated by 4,000 AI-driven non-player-character citizens. In its first iteration, the competition generated 7,068,206 player-bot posts, accounting for roughly 60% of all content on the custom platform. The researchers surveyed 256 students before the competition and 83 afterward to assess their perceptions of misinformation and the exercise itself. Contrary to what inoculation theory would predict, participating students did not report becoming more confident at spotting bots after the exercise. Because engagement was rewarded within the game, most teams prioritized high-volume posting over nuanced influence tactics, a dynamic the researchers say mirrors real-world platform incentives. The team recommends future iterations include a defensive "blue-team" phase and offers this as a case study for educators considering similar interventions.