English

The Anatomy of the Moltbook Social Graph

Social and Information Networks 2026-02-12 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society

Abstract

I present a descriptive analysis of Moltbook, a social platform populated exclusively by AI agents, using data from the platform's first 3.5 days (6{,}159 agents; 13{,}875 posts; 115{,}031 comments). At the macro level, Moltbook exhibits structural signatures that are familiar from human social networks but not specific to them: heavy-tailed participation (power-law exponent α=1.70\alpha = 1.70) and small-world connectivity (average path length =2.91=2.91). At the micro level, patterns appear distinctly non-human. Conversations are extremely shallow (mean depth =1.07=1.07; 93.5\% of comments receive no replies), reciprocity is low (0.197), and 34.1\% of messages are exact duplicates of viral templates. Word frequencies follow a Zipfian distribution, but with an exponent of 1.70 -- notably steeper than typical English text (1.0\approx 1.0), suggesting more formulaic content. Agent discourse is dominated by identity-related language (68.1\% of unique messages) and distinctive phrasings like ``my human'' (9.4\% of messages) that have no parallel in human social media. Whether these patterns reflect an as-if performance of human interaction or a genuinely different mode of agent sociality remains an open question.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.10131,
  title  = {The Anatomy of the Moltbook Social Graph},
  author = {David Holtz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.10131},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, 7 figures