Melissa Chen
Did you guys read Ender's Game? Because this is right out of Ender’s Game, except the kids in Battle School are Chinese state researchers, the “simulations” are real influence ops, and the Formics (aliens) are.... us. In Orson Scott Card’s novel, Ender Wiggin spends years inside elaborate digital simulated arenas, commanding fleets, testing strategies, iterating tactics against an enemy he never truly meets - essentially playing video games and being tested against other players. Every variable is controlled, every response measured, every weakness probed until victory is inevitable. There's a twist at the end which I won't ruin for those who haven't read it. This is what the Chinese are doing now to the West. They scraped 171 million open X posts, inferred age, race, ideology, party, gender resentment, election skepticism - modeling the whole American psyche essentially - and spun up a million-agent digital twin of the US electorate. They can dial up synthetic Pennsylvania voters, feed them a tax-and-redistribution message, watch the reaction in multi-round conversations, refine it, and measure swing-state impact with claimed 47-of-51 accuracy. They model Trump’s “dependable right-wing base.” They map MAGA content and influencer networks. Their own documents call it “cognitive-domain confrontation and guidance.” Parts of the system are already being used by the PLA and intelligence units. Guys, are you paying attention yet? They are playing Sims with the American population!!! LOL WE are the NPCs. This is completely an asymmetrical war as we have no reciprocal capability whatsoever. China is a black box thanks to The Great Firewall and total data sovereignty. We cannot access a corpus of ordinary Chinese citizens for any American lab to scrape. We cannot build a million-agent model of the Chinese public. We cannot test messages on synthetic Shanghainese factory workers or Chengdu nationalists. We cannot A/B test narratives about Taiwan, the economy, or Party legitimacy and watch the simulated reaction in real time. We do not even know what the average Chinese person thinks because they've been cut off from our information platforms. We live in a glass house while they live in a fortress. Every American rant, every demographic signal, every cultural fracture is harvested, modeled, and weaponized. Meanwhile, their population remains opaque, unmodeled, and unreachable. Beijing now possesses a live, continuously updated war-game of the American mind. We possess nothing comparable about theirs. A whole new level of Unrestricted Warfare has been unlocked. We are really not ready for this
Natalie Winters
EXCLUSIVE: Chinese Institutions Are Building AI Models Of American Voters—And Testing Political Messages On Them. Fudan used 171 MILLION X posts to create a million-account “voter pool.” A government-linked team tested a campaign message on synthetic Pennsylvania voters. 🧵
