The paper proposes a Friedkin‑Johnsen based framework to identify influential users in online social networks and assess how they shape community opinion. By manipulating initial opinions in experiments, the authors show that top influencers can significantly shift overall community sentiment, and their influence extends beyond direct neighbors to second‑degree contacts. The framework is validated on a tweet dataset from the U.S. presidential election, illustrating the power of digital influencers to alter public opinion.
The studying of opinion dynamics and its propagation within social networks is crucial for addressing a wide range of challenges, including political polarization, public health, and marketing strateg...
The paper introduces a digital‑twin framework that simulates opinion dynamics in real Twitter networks by assigning agents attributes such as persona, emotions, centrality, stubbornness, and influence, and using Mistral‑7B to update opinions based on memory and social exposure. Validation on COVID‑19 and U.S. election 2020 datasets shows the framework reproduces opinion trajectories, reducing prediction error by over 50% compared to classical baselines, and improves structural alignment and polarization dynamics. Ablation studies reveal that agent attributes, memory, and social exposure all contribute to predictive fidelity, with agent attributes being the most critical.
The paper introduces a controlled testbed to study how goal‑directed persuaders shift stances in networks of large language model agents, using real‑world ego‑network topologies. Experiments across four LLM backbones, five graph structures, and 55 policy statements show that persuasion dynamics depend on topology, competition, topic, and model prior. The study finds that direct exposure predicts stance change, peer relays have measurable influence, and that post‑text analysis alone misses important movement, highlighting the need to evaluate multi‑agent persuasion through trajectory‑level processes, belief probes, exposure provenance, and action logs.
The paper reviews how large language models (LLMs) are being used to model social networks, highlighting their ability to represent users, relationships, and interactions through natural language. It categorizes existing work into network generative models—split into selection‑based and interaction‑based approaches—and dynamic process models, which cover opinion dynamics, information diffusion, and rumor propagation. The survey also discusses the advantages of LLMs for realistic, context‑aware social behavior, while noting limitations such as social biases and prompt sensitivity, and outlines open research challenges and future directions.
arXiv:2312. 04603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online polarization has attracted the attention of researchers for many years.
The paper introduces the Persuasion Index (PI), a taxonomy of 15 persuasion dimensions grounded in psychological and communication theories, implemented with 55 lexicon- and rule-based sub-features. PI is modular, allowing individual detectors to be swapped while preserving its theoretical framework. Evaluations on four English argumentative datasets show that PI provides a shared, lightweight feature space that captures meaningful predictive signals and reveals consistent dimension-level associations with persuasion outcomes, with variations across topics and stances.
arXiv:2608.30311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Social media platforms increasingly use AI-based credibility indicators to help users judge misinformation. Unlike individual human-AI decision-makin...
arXiv:2606. 02883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommender systems have grown from content-organization tools into sophisticated systems that shape daily behavior.
arXiv:2607. 21842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on political polarization on social media depends on the ability to reliably measure partisanship in user-generated content.
arXiv:2605. 25929v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The effectiveness of multi-agent LLM deliberation depends not only on the agents' individual predictions, but also on how they communicate and collaborate.
arXiv:2608.29803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as proxies for human participants in social simulations, yet whether they update their beliefs...
arXiv:2607. 15284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While recommendation systems enable users to find articles of interest, they can also create ``filter bubbles'' by presenting content that reinforces users' pre-existing beliefs.