Trending topics have become a significant part of modern social media, attracting users to participate in discussions of breaking events. However, they also bring in a new channel for poisoning attacks, resulting in negative impacts on society. Therefore, it is urgent to study this critical problem and develop effective strategies for defense. In this paper, we propose TrendSim, an LLM-based multi-agent system to simulate trending topics in social media under poisoning attacks. Specifically, we create a simulation environment for trending topics that incorporates a time-aware interaction mechanism, centralized message dissemination, and an interactive system. Moreover, we develop LLM-based human-like agents to simulate users in social media, and propose prototype-based attackers to replicate poisoning attacks. Besides, we evaluate TrendSim from multiple aspects to validate its effectiveness. Based on TrendSim, we conduct simulation experiments to study four critical problems about poisoning attacks on trending topics for social benefit.
@article{arxiv.2412.12196,
title = {TrendSim: Simulating Trending Topics in Social Media Under Poisoning Attacks with LLM-based Multi-agent System},
author = {Zeyu Zhang and Jianxun Lian and Chen Ma and Yaning Qu and Ye Luo and Lei Wang and Rui Li and Xu Chen and Yankai Lin and Le Wu and Xing Xie and Ji-Rong Wen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.12196},
year = {2024}
}