Abstract

Generative agents are rapidly advancing in sophistication, raising urgent questions about how they might coordinate when deployed in online ecosystems. This is particularly consequential in information operations (IOs), influence campaigns that aim to manipulate public opinion on social media. While traditional IOs have been orchestrated by human operators and relied on manually crafted tactics, agentic AI promises to make campaigns more automated, adaptive, and difficult to detect. This work presents the first systematic study of emergent coordination among generative agents in simulated IO campaigns. Using generative agent-based modeling, we instantiate IO and organic agents in a simulated environment and evaluate coordination across operational regimes, from simple goal alignment to team knowledge and collective decision-making. As operational regimes become more structured, IO networks …

Date

2026

Authors

Gian Marco Orlando, Jinyi Ye, Valerio La Gatta, Mahdi Saeedi, Vincenzo Moscato, Emilio Ferrara, Luca Luceri

Book

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026

Pages

4805-4816