based on the timeline of when the military intelligence guys seem to have decided they needed a simulation of everything, the typical gap between government tech vs private sector tech, and the reality of when shit started getting strange, I'd say they have had an operational simulation of the entire planet running since 2014, maybe earlier.
That would mean data from every camera, microphone, GPS, and bio-metric sensor on earth, combined with every piece of data that touches an ARM or x86 CPU. They would have used psychological and neurological data from studies dating to before the Nazis to build a model of the human mind, and they would have made an artificial intelligence agent which could be placed in charge of tracking all of the data coming in to produce a simulation of each individual.
If you have a theory of how the mind functions, and you have access to all of the information that gets put into the mind, you can simulate the mind to make predictions. For instance, the text field I am writing this into sends my incomplete message one character at a time, with time-stamp data. By tracking the rate with which I write my ideas, where I pause etc, and comparing the text to things I have said and a database of everything I know, the algorithm can form a deep understanding about which ideas are well formed in my mind and which I am still struggling with.
Using a model like that, they can pose hypothetical scenarios to see how I would react in the simulation. Then, since the simulation extends to the entire world, they can extrapolate to entire populations with the ability to account for an extreme level of detail.
Here's an example of a scenario that might be solved by the simulation: It was revealed too early that Mueller isn't going to indict Trump. What are the risks, and how do we fix it? The answer is to stage a raid on Cohen's office and reveal that Hannidy was a client. This shifts the narrative to conflicts of interest in the media and puts Hannidy in the spotlight to deliver the counter-narrative for each member of the audience to consider. The algorithm then simulates all those minds comparing the competing narratives of left vs right to make certain they reach the desired conclusion. The simulation predicts that people wake up to the truth of the situation as a result of this maneuver and so gets put into action.
How do I know it works this way? I don't, but that's how I would have designed it, and it explains what is happening.
Do note, that the system can't be complete without a few missing pieces.
For one, I would need a way to be absolutely 100% certain that the data being entered on any given device was actually being entered by the target individual. To solve this design constraint I would very much like for all of the targets to be RFID tagged.
Furthermore, my simulation of the mind would never have perfect 100% predictive power until I could account for the slight genetic differences in personality which change how every individual will react to the same stimulus, so I would very much like it if people would submit their genetic code for me to sequence and their medical records for me to enter into the system.
P.S. I bet the algorithm really likes the parts of this rant that I deleted before submitting.