To main content

IO Factory: Simulating AI-Enabled Influence Campaigns at Scale

Abstract

We introduce IO Factory, an AI-driven framework for simulating information and influence campaigns as fully integrated, traceable processes. The threat of digital manipulation now extends beyond persuasive text from individual language models to AI swarms, i.e., persistent groups of coordinated agents that adapt to platform feedback and disguise organized campaigns as ordinary social interaction. Because such campaigns cannot be identified from isolated messages alone, they must be analyzed across a continuous spectrum of planning, platform action, exposure, interpretation, measurement, and adaptation. IO Factory represents this process inside a controlled simulated platform, linking actor roles, platform actions, exposure records, structured model-based evaluations, and configured changes in the simulated population. We implement the architecture and evaluate it across configurations of up to 100,000 agents. The results show that IO Factory executes campaign timelines at scale and produces inspectable evidence of exposure and measured movement in configured belief variables. By recording the actors, objectives, action constraints, exposure paths, and measurement rules used in each run, IO Factory supports reproducible research and red-team analysis of coordinated influence.

Category

Working paper

Language

Other

Author(s)

  • Lukasz Olejnik
  • Wenchao Dong
  • Jonas R. Kunst
  • Signe Riemer-Sørensen
  • Tobias Herb
  • Meeyoung Cha
  • Daniel Thilo Schroeder

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Sustainable Communication Technologies

Date

11.08.2026

Year

2026

Publisher

arxiv.org

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository