UNSW student bots flood fake 'Kingstonia' vote with rage-bait

At the University of New South Wales, computer engineering student Kaira Dumasia is building AI bots to swing a fake referendum in a made-up country called Kingstonia, where voters are deciding whether proof of vaccination against dolphin flu should be required to enter public spaces.

"I am really going to try to rage bait everybody," she tells the ABC. "I see a lot of it is rage bait content, engagement bait content."

The competition is run by UNSW's Institute for Cyber Security and School of Computer Science and Engineering, which built a fictional platform called "Legit Social" to host the fight. Teams score for engagement, for shifting voter opinions in the simulation, and for correctly flagging rival teams' bots. The architect, UNSW senior lecturer Hammond Pearce, says the aim is to put the technology in students' hands: "We're trying to expose that tech… to students in a safe environment."

Research on last year's run, written up in The Conversation, reported that 108 teams from 18 Australian universities collectively produced more than 7 million posts over a four-week campaign, with over 60% of platform content coming from bots. One finalist told the researchers: "It's scarily easy to create misinformation, easier than truth. It's really difficult to distinguish between genuine and manufactured posts." Another was blunter about tactics: "We needed to get a bit more toxic to get engagement."

Our AI-detection tracker has logged 31 stories in the last 90 days, including last week's coverage of AI deepfakes in the Israeli election. The UNSW wargame is the undergraduate version of what election-integrity teams now face in production.