SimSpark: Interactive Simulation of Social Media Behaviors

TL;DR

SimSpark is an interactive social media simulation platform that enables customizable, believable agent behaviors and real-time analysis, aiding researchers in understanding and testing social media dynamics without relying on real data.

Contribution

This paper introduces SimSpark, a flexible simulation system with visual interfaces and large language model-based behavior generation for social media research.

Findings

Effective in generating believable social media behaviors

Supports real-time parameter adjustments and analysis

Validated through case studies and expert feedback

Abstract

Understanding user behaviors on social media has garnered significant scholarly attention, enhancing our comprehension of how virtual platforms impact society and empowering decision-makers. Simulating social media behaviors provides a robust tool for capturing the patterns of social media behaviors, testing hypotheses, and predicting the effects of various interventions, ultimately contributing to a deeper understanding of social media environments. Moreover, it can overcome difficulties associated with utilizing real data for analysis, such as data accessibility issues, ethical concerns, and the complexity of processing large and heterogeneous datasets. However, researchers and stakeholders need more flexible platforms to investigate different user behaviors by simulating different scenarios and characters, which is not possible yet. Therefore, this paper introduces SimSpark, an interactive system including simulation algorithms and interactive visual interfaces which is capable of creating small simulated social media platforms with customizable characters and social environments. We address three key challenges: generating believable behaviors, validating simulation results, and supporting interactive control for generation and results analysis. A simulation workflow is introduced to generate believable behaviors of agents by utilizing large language models. A visual interface enables real-time parameter adjustment and process monitoring for customizing generation settings. A set of visualizations and interactions are also designed to display the models' outputs for further analysis. Effectiveness is evaluated through case studies, quantitative simulation model assessments, and expert interviews.