No, I mean understanding in great detail how ideas propagate through social networks of human beings, with the idea in mind of sending your own ideas propagating through for useful effects. The SBIR I bid on was explicitly for doing this to countries the US had acquired in foreign wars. My excuse ... I had a lady friend serving in Mosul. Now a days I look at that as a fairly terrible thing to work on which could only make the world worse if it had succeeded.
This example (which OP helpfully told me I was mistaken about) would have been one of a sort of "forced hand" as in stage magic. I doubt as anyone could have foreseen that specific paper being googled up, but one can easily foresee things relating to that drug being more exposed in a group like ours than they were ... 4 years ago or something. Add a lot of little things up like that, and you can really push things in a desired direction in a group of people. Enough groups of people, and you are influencing an entire society in pretty radical ways. Lots of modern propaganda works this way in large and small ways. If you've been alive for a while, you'll see that we've had some pretty significant changes for the last couple of decades.
My "contribution" would have been providing a model to test scenarios. They actually funded a considerably less speculative project than mine: more or less Poisson regression applied to this problem.