Talk Abstract
Social media bots are often treated as a monolithic threat to be detected and removed, yet empirical evidence show that these automated accounts occupy diverse social roles and have been used for good. This talk presents a unified framework for simulating the different types of social media bot personas. Across two complementary simulation systems, we demonstrate how heterogeneous automated agents shape information diffusion, belief formation and intervention outcomes at scale. First, we introduce a persona-driven social simulation where LLMs parameterize agents with distinct personas, and these agents, together with LLM-generated content enables agents to engage in realistic, goal-directed discourse within a social network. Second, we show that while malicious automation can rapidly destabilize information environments, the deployment of useful agents for proactive narrative seeding and reactive correction can delay or prevent the formation of undesired information equilibra. By unifying LLMs with agent-based modeling, this talk offers a forward-looking methodology for analyzing digital influence, testing intervention strategies, and understanding how automated bot agents can shape the cognitive terrain of online societies.
Biography
Lynnette Hui Xian Ng is a final-year PhD student in Societal Computing at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. As a graduate researcher and Knight Fellow at Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS), her research examines the automated behavior of Cyber Social Agents on social media. Her current work focuses around network and engagement impact of behavioral influence techniques applied by these agents. Her work has been published in venues such as AAAI International Conference for Web and Social Media, ACM The Web Conference, Information Management & Processing, Big Data & Society, Applied Network Science, etc. Her work has also won Best Paper Awards at leading journals, have been featured in magazine articles of New Scientist, Impact Magazine, and her work has also trended on Reddit. Her book, Bots, Bias and Influence: The Hidden Architect of Social Media, will be out in late 2026.
Location
Sennott Square, Room 5317
Date
Friday, Feb. 6 at noon to 2 p.m.