English

Agent-Based Simulations of Online Political Discussions: A Case Study on Elections in Germany

Artificial Intelligence 2025-04-14 v2 Computers and Society

Abstract

User engagement on social media platforms is influenced by historical context, time constraints, and reward-driven interactions. This study presents an agent-based simulation approach that models user interactions, considering past conversation history, motivation, and resource constraints. Utilizing German Twitter data on political discourse, we fine-tune AI models to generate posts and replies, incorporating sentiment analysis, irony detection, and offensiveness classification. The simulation employs a myopic best-response model to govern agent behavior, accounting for decision-making based on expected rewards. Our results highlight the impact of historical context on AI-generated responses and demonstrate how engagement evolves under varying constraints.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.24199,
  title  = {Agent-Based Simulations of Online Political Discussions: A Case Study on Elections in Germany},
  author = {Abdul Sittar and Simon Münker and Fabio Sartori and Andreas Reitenbach and Achim Rettinger and Michael Mäs and Alenka Guček and Marko Grobelnik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.24199},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

I forgot to take the consent from all other co authors and they want to withdraw it