Camille Thibault

Dan Zhao

The online information ecosystem enables influence campaigns of unprecedented scale and impact. We urgently need empirically grounded approa… (see more)ches to counter the growing threat of malicious campaigns, now amplified by generative AI. But, developing defenses in real-world settings is impractical. Social system simulations with agents modelled using Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising alternative approach and a growing area of research. However, existing simulators lack features needed to capture the complex information-sharing dynamics of platform-based social networks. To bridge this gap, we present SandboxSocial, a new simulator that includes several key innovations, mainly: (1) a virtual social media platform (modelled as Mastodon and mirrored in an actual Mastodon server) that enables a realistic setting in which agents interact; (2) an adapter that uses real-world user data to create more grounded agents and social media content; and (3) multi-modal capabilities that enable our agents to interact using both text and images---just as humans do on social media. We make the simulator more useful to researchers by providing measurement and analysis tools that track simulation dynamics and compute evaluation metrics to compare experimental results.

2025-08-15

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

doi.org

A Guide to Misinformation Detection Data and Evaluation

Jacob-Junqi Tian

Gabrielle Peloquin-Skulski

Taylor Lynn Curtis

James Zhou

Florence Laflamme

Luke Yuxiang Guan

Misinformation is a complex societal issue, and mitigating solutions are difficult to create due to data deficiencies. To address this, we h… (see more)ave curated the largest collection of (mis)information datasets in the literature, totaling 75. From these, we evaluated the quality of 36 datasets that consist of statements or claims, as well as the 9 datasets that consist of data in purely paragraph form. We assess these datasets to identify those with solid foundations for empirical work and those with flaws that could result in misleading and non-generalizable results, such as spurious correlations, or examples that are ambiguous or otherwise impossible to assess for veracity. We find the latter issue is particularly severe and affects most datasets in the literature. We further provide state-of-the-art baselines on all these datasets, but show that regardless of label quality, categorical labels may no longer give an accurate evaluation of detection model performance. Finally, we propose and highlight Evaluation Quality Assurance (EQA) as a tool to guide the field toward systemic solutions rather than inadvertently propagating issues in evaluation. Overall, this guide aims to provide a roadmap for higher quality data and better grounded evaluations, ultimately improving research in misinformation detection. All datasets and other artifacts are available at https://misinfo-datasets.complexdatalab.com/.

2024-12-31

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (published)

doi.org

openreview.net

A Simulation System Towards Solving Societal-Scale Manipulation

Maximilian Puelma Touzel

Sneheel Sarangi

Austin Welch

Gayatri K

Dan Zhao

Zachary Yang

Hao Yu

Ethan Kosak-Hine

Tom Gibbs

Andreea Musulan

Busra Tugce Gurbuz

The rise of AI-driven manipulation poses significant risks to societal trust and democratic processes. Yet, studying these effects in real-w… (see more)orld settings at scale is ethically and logistically impractical, highlighting a need for simulation tools that can model these dynamics in controlled settings to enable experimentation with possible defenses. We present a simulation environment designed to address this. We elaborate upon the Concordia framework that simulates offline, `real life' activity by adding online interactions to the simulation through social media with the integration of a Mastodon server. We improve simulation efficiency and information flow, and add a set of measurement tools, particularly longitudinal surveys. We demonstrate the simulator with a tailored example in which we track agents' political positions and show how partisan manipulation of agents can affect election results.

2024-10-16

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Simulation System Towards Solving Societal-Scale Manipulation

Maximilian Puelma Touzel

Sneheel Sarangi

Austin Welch

Gayatri K

Dan Zhao

Zachary Yang

Hao Yu

Tom Gibbs

Ethan Kosak-Hine

Andreea Musulan

Busra Tugce Gurbuz