Using LLM Agents to Evaluate Prosocial Interventions on Social Media Platforms

원문 초록

Social media platforms are a primary source of information for many users. Although research explores various interventions to promote prosocial content or demote harmful content on platforms, there are few systematic methods for evaluating competing intervention designs before conducting costly human-subject experiments. We develop a simulation-based evaluation pipeline built on the OASIS framework. We generate 13,835 LLM-based agents, each with a unique profile. Over 20 time steps, we expose them to real-world Twitter/X posts and let them comment, like, repost, or follow. We use those agents to systematically evaluate three interventions that increase exposure to verified news: adding content, upranking content, and celebrity source cues. All interventions significantly increase news engagement, with upranking news to prominent feed positions producing the largest effects. These effects hold across agents' gender, age, and education levels. We validate our injection treatment results against a comparable human-subject study and find strong directional alignment and similar dose-normalized efficiency. Our results suggest that LLM-based agent simulations can support early-stage evaluation of platform interventions before human-subject deployment, and upranking may be more effective than news volume or source.