Proceedings

SandboxSocial: A Sandbox for Social Media Using Multimodal AI Agents

Maximilian Puelma Touzel, Sneheel Sarangi, Gayatri Krishnakumar, Busra Tugce Gurbuz, Austin Welch, Zachary Yang, Andreea Musulan, Hao Yu, Ethan Kosak-Hine, Tom Gibbs, Camille Thibault, Reihaneh Rabbany, Jean-François Godbout, Dan Zhao, Kellin Pelrine

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Demo Track. Pages 11100-11103.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1271

Keywords

  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Agent-based simulation and emergence
  • Natural Language Processing: NLP: Language models
  • Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Social sciences
  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Agent societies

Abstract

The online information ecosystem enables influence campaigns of unprecedented scale and impact. We urgently need empirically grounded approaches 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.

Maximilian Puelma Touzel, Sneheel Sarangi, Gayatri Krishnakumar, Busra Tugce Gurbuz, Austin Welch, Zachary Yang, Andreea Musulan, Hao Yu, Ethan Kosak-Hine, Tom Gibbs, Camille Thibault, Reihaneh Rabbany, Jean-François Godbout, Dan Zhao, and Kellin Pelrine. 2025. SandboxSocial: A Sandbox for Social Media Using Multimodal AI Agents. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 11100–11103. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1271
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