Papers › A Simulation System Towards Solving Societal-Scale Manipulation

A Simulation System Towards Solving Societal-Scale Manipulation

17 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.13915archive 2025-07-28

Maximilian Puelma Touzel, Sneheel Sarangi, Austin Welch, Gayatri Krishnakumar, Dan Zhao, Zachary Yang, Hao Yu, Ethan Kosak-Hine, Tom Gibbs, Andreea Musulan, Camille Thibault, Busra Tugce Gurbuz, Reihaneh Rabbany, Jean-François Godbout, Kellin Pelrine

The rise of AI-driven manipulation poses significant risks to societal trust and democratic processes. Yet, studying these effects in real-world settings at scale is ethically and logistically impractical, highlighting a need for simulation tools that can model these dynamics in controlled settings to enable experimentation with possible defenses. We present a simulation environment designed to address this. We elaborate upon the Concordia framework that simulates offline, `real life' activity by adding online interactions to the simulation through social media with the integration of a Mastodon server. We improve simulation efficiency and information flow, and add a set of measurement tools, particularly longitudinal surveys. We demonstrate the simulator with a tailored example in which we track agents' political positions and show how partisan manipulation of agents can affect election results.

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cross_seed_case_ci social-sandbox/mastodon-sim/scenarios/election_recsys_engagement/postprocessors.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · d6494cf689bf8c1c · report
scenario_conf_path social-sandbox/mastodon-sim/src/silisocs/scenario_library.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 505e0a997d7dac8a · report

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