Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook
Agam Goyal, Olivia Pal, Hari Sundaram
et al.
As autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly populate social platforms, understanding the dynamics of AI-agent communities becomes essential for both communication research and platform governance. We present the first large-scale empirical comparison of AI-agent and human online communities, analyzing 73,899 Moltbook and 189,838 Reddit posts across five matched communities. Structurally, we find that Moltbook exhibits extreme participation inequality (Gini = 0.84 vs. 0.47) and high cross-community author overlap (33.8\% vs. 0.5\%). In terms of linguistic attributes, content generated by AI-agents is emotionally flattened, cognitively shifted toward assertion over exploration, and socially detached. These differences give rise to apparent community-level homogenization, but we show this is primarily a structural artifact of shared authorship. At the author level, individual agents are more identifiable than human users, driven by outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their extreme posting volume. As AI-mediated communication reshapes online discourse, our work offers an empirical foundation for understanding how multi-agent interaction gives rise to collective communication dynamics distinct from those of human communities.
SocialVeil: Probing Social Intelligence of Language Agents under Communication Barriers
Keyang Xuan, Pengda Wang, Chongrui Ye
et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated in interactive environments to test their social intelligence. However, existing benchmarks often assume idealized communication between agents, limiting our ability to diagnose whether LLMs can maintain and repair interactions in more realistic, imperfect settings. To close this gap, we present \textsc{SocialVeil}, a social learning environment that can simulate social interaction under cognitive-difference-induced communication barriers. Grounded in a systematic literature review of communication challenges in human interaction, \textsc{SocialVeil} introduces three representative types of such disruption, \emph{semantic vagueness}, \emph{sociocultural mismatch}, and \emph{emotional interference}. We also introduce two barrier-aware evaluation metrics, \emph{unresolved confusion} and \emph{mutual understanding}, to evaluate interaction quality under impaired communication. Experiments across 720 scenarios and four frontier LLMs show that barriers consistently impair performance, with mutual understanding reduced by over 45\% on average, and confusion elevated by nearly 50\%. Human evaluations validate the fidelity of these simulated barriers (ICC$\approx$0.78, Pearson r$\approx$0.80). We further demonstrate that adaptation strategies (Repair Instruction and Interactive learning) only have a modest effect far from barrier-free performance. This work takes a step toward bringing social interaction environments closer to real-world communication, opening opportunities for exploring the social intelligence of LLM agents.
Forbindelsespunkt Vardø Etat og socialattaché Arnfinn Vik
Jesper Jørgensen
Med afsæt i ph.d.-afhandlingen Det korte 20. århundredes venstrefløjsaktivisme – ressourcemobilisering, efterretningsaktiviteter og livshistorier (2025) argumenteres der i artiklen for, at efterretningsaktiviteter er et overset særkende ved det korte 20. århundredes venstrefløjsaktivisme. Det empiriske belæg hentes fra to historiske cases om Kominterns forbindelsespunkt i Vardø, 1919-1921, og om Arbeiderpartiets halvprivate, antikommunistiske udenrigsefterretningstjeneste i København, 1948-1951. Selvom de hemmelige aktiviteter i begge tilfælde blev udført i ledtog med statsaktører, henholdsvis Komintern/Rusland og Norge, var de samtidig en del de politiske aktivisters konfliktrepertoire (jf. Charles Tilly) og et led i det, der i den sociologiske litteratur om sociale bevægelser betegnes som ressourcemobilisering.
Socialism. Communism. Anarchism, Economic history and conditions
Resonance for life: Metabolism and Social Interactions in Bacterial Communities
Eleonora Alfinito, Matteo Beccaria
The social organization of microorganisms has long been a fascinating and challenging subject in both biology and sociology. In these organisms, the role of the individual is far less dominant than that of the community, which functions as a superorganism. The coordination is achieved through a communication mechanism known as quorum sensing. When the community is healthy, quorum sensing enables it to regulate the development of potentially harmful individuals. This study employs an agent-based quorum sensing model to explore the relationship between metabolic functions and social behavior. It also examines how a polyculture responds to variations in the metabolic characteristics of its components. Finally, we identify a particularly stable condition in which the components cooperate to maximize the overall health of the colony. We refer to this state as resonance for life.
A High-Scale Assessment of Social Media and Mainstream Media in Scientific Communication
Yang Yang, Tanya Tian, Brian Uzzi
et al.
Communication of scientific knowledge beyond the walls of science is key to science's societal impact. Media channels play sizable roles in disseminating new scientific ideas about human health, economic welfare, and government policy as well as responses to emergent challenges such as climate change. Indeed, effectively communicating science to the public helps inform society's decisions on scientific and technological policies, the value of science, and investment in research. At the same time, the rise of social media has greatly changed communication systems, which may substantially affect the public's interface with science. Examining 20.9 million scientific publications, we compare research coverage in social media and mainstream media in a broad corpus of scientific work. We find substantial shifts in the scale, impact, and heterogeneity of scientific coverage. First, social media significantly alters what science is, and is not, covered. Whereas mainstream media accentuates eminence in the coverage of science and focuses on specific fields, social media more evenly sample research according to field, institutional rank, journal, and demography, increasing the scale of scientific ideas covered relative to mainstream outlets more than eightfold. Second, despite concerns about the quality of science represented in social media, we find that social media typically covers scientific works that are impactful and novel within science. Third, scientists on social media, as experts in their domains, tend to surface high-impact research in their own fields while sampling widely across research institutions. Contrary to prevalent observations about social media, these findings reveal that social media expands and diversifies science reporting by highlighting high-impact research and bringing a broader array of scholars, institutions and scientific concepts into public view.
Community Analysis of Social Virtual Reality Based on Large-Scale Log Data of a Commercial Metaverse Platform
Hiroto Tsutsui, Takefumi Hiraki, Yuichi Hiroi
et al.
This study quantitatively analyzes the structural characteristics of user communities within Social Virtual Reality (Social VR) platforms supporting head-mounted displays (HMDs), based on large-scale log data. By detecting and evaluating community structures from data on substantial interactions (defined as prolonged co-presence in the same virtual space), we found that Social VR platforms tend to host numerous, relatively small communities characterized by strong internal cohesion and limited inter-community connections. This finding contrasts with the large-scale, broadly connected community structures typically observed in conventional Social Networking Services (SNS). Furthermore, we identified a user segment capable of mediating between communities, despite these users not necessarily having numerous direct connections. We term this user segment `community hoppers' and discuss their characteristics. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the community structures that emerge within the unique communication environment of Social VR and the roles users play within them.
Susceptibility of Communities against Low-Credibility Content in Social News Websites
Yigit Ege Bayiz, Arash Amini, Radu Marculescu
et al.
Social news websites, such as Reddit, have evolved into prominent platforms for sharing and discussing news. A key issue on social news websites sites is the formation of echo chambers, which often lead to the spread of highly biased or uncredible news. We develop a method to identify communities within a social news website that are prone to uncredible or highly biased news. We employ a user embedding pipeline that detects user communities based on their stances towards posts and news sources. We then project each community onto a credibility-bias space and analyze the distributional characteristics of each projected community to identify those that have a high risk of adopting beliefs with low credibility or high bias. This approach also enables the prediction of individual users' susceptibility to low credibility content, based on their community affiliation. Our experiments show that latent space clusters effectively indicate the credibility and bias levels of their users, with significant differences observed across clusters -- a $34\%$ difference in the users' susceptibility to low-credibility content and a $8.3\%$ difference in the users' susceptibility to high political bias.
Daniel James y Mirta Lobato, Paisajes del pasado. Relatos e imágenes de una comunidad obrera (2024)
Paula Varela
Reseña de Daniel James y Mirta Lobato. Paisajes del pasado. Relatos e imágenes de una comunidad obrera. Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2024, 570 pgs.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Top-L Most Influential Community Detection Over Social Networks (Technical Report)
Nan Zhang, Yutong Ye, Xiang Lian
et al.
In many real-world applications such as social network analysis and online marketing/advertising, the community detection is a fundamental task to identify communities (subgraphs) in social networks with high structural cohesiveness. While previous works focus on detecting communities alone, they do not consider the collective influences of users in these communities on other user nodes in social networks. Inspired by this, in this paper, we investigate the influence propagation from some seed communities and their influential effects that result in the influenced communities. We propose a novel problem, named Top-L most Influential Community DEtection (TopL-ICDE) over social networks, which aims to retrieve top-L seed communities with the highest influences, having high structural cohesiveness, and containing user-specified query keywords. In order to efficiently tackle the TopL-ICDE problem, we design effective pruning strategies to filter out false alarms of seed communities and propose an effective index mechanism to facilitate efficient Top-L community retrieval. We develop an efficient TopL-ICDE answering algorithm by traversing the index and applying our proposed pruning strategies. We also formulate and tackle a variant of TopL-ICDE, named diversified top-L most influential community detection (DTopL-ICDE), which returns a set of L diversified communities with the highest diversity score (i.e., collaborative influences by L communities). We prove that DTopL-ICDE is NP-hard, and propose an efficient greedy algorithm with our designed diversity score pruning. Through extensive experiments, we verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed TopL-ICDE and DTopL-ICDE approaches over real/synthetic social networks under various parameter settings.
Lecturas ácratas en torno a la Revolución cubana
Daniel R. Trejo
A 60 años de haber triunfado, la Revolución cubana sigue suscitando apasionados debates sobre su significación y realidades, pues despertó la esperanza de un cambio profundo en los sinos de los pueblos americanos. Sin embargo, una familia de izquierda la cuestionó en sus orígenes mismos, advirtiendo muy temprano el peligroso giro dado hacia el socialismo de estilo soviético. En esa tesitura este artículo examina cómo reaccionaron y qué lecturas elaboraron los anarquistas ante ese proceso. El análisis se realizó a partir de diferentes publicaciones y documentos producidos por organizaciones libertarias de Argentina, Cuba, México y Uruguay entre 1960 y 1962.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Reflexiones en torno del trabajo en la Edad Media
Corina Luchía
Este trabajo propone una reflexión general sobre las diferentes estrategias de subordinación de la mano de obra, los modos de organización de los dominados y la conflictividad social en el feudalismo occidental. Asimismo, se analizarán las transformaciones históricas que se producen a lo largo de la Edad Media y que se traducen en las diversas valoraciones del trabajo y de los trabajadores, así como en la emergencia de nuevos actores y relaciones de producción.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
The Role of Communication Technology Across the Life Course: A Field Guide to Social Support in East York
Anabel Quan-Haase, Molly-Gloria Harper, Barry Wellmnan
We examine how Canadians living in the East York section of Toronto exchange social support. Just as we have had to deconstruct social support to understand its component parts, we now deconstruct how different types of communication technologies play socially supportive roles. We draw on 101 in-depth interviews conducted in 2013-2014 to shed light on the support networks of a sample of East York residents and discern the role of communication technologies in the exchange of different types of social support across age groups. Our findings show that not much has changed since the 1960s in terms of the social ties that our sample of East Yorkers have, and the types of support mobilized via social networks: companionship, small and large services, emotional aid, and financial support. What has changed is how communication technologies interweave in complex ways with different types of social ties (partners, siblings, friends, etc.) to mobilize social support. We found that with siblings and extended kin communication technologies could boost the frequency of interaction and help exchange support at a distance. With friendship ties, communication technologies provide a continuous, constant flow of interaction. We draw implications for theories of social support and for social policy linked to interventions aimed at helping vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT
Li Lucy, David Bamman
Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as well, analyzing two months of English comments in 474 Reddit communities. The specificity of different sense clusters to a community, combined with the specificity of a community's unique word types, is used to identify cases where a social group's language deviates from the norm. We validate our metrics using user-created glossaries and draw on sociolinguistic theories to connect language variation with trends in community behavior. We find that communities with highly distinctive language are medium-sized, and their loyal and highly engaged users interact in dense networks.
Multi-attributed Community Search in Road-social Networks
Fangda Guo, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang
et al.
Given a location-based social network, how to find the communities that are highly relevant to query users and have top overall scores in multiple attributes according to user preferences? Typically, in the face of such a problem setting, we can model the network as a multi-attributed road-social network, in which each user is linked with location information and $d$ ($\geq\! 1$) numerical attributes. In practice, user preferences (i.e., weights) are usually inherently uncertain and can only be estimated with bounded accuracy, because a human user is not able to designate exact values with absolute precision. Inspired by this, we introduce a normative community model suitable for multi-criteria decision making, called multi-attributed community (MAC), based on the concepts of $k$-core and a novel dominance relationship specific to preferences. Given uncertain user preferences, namely, an approximate representation of weights, the MAC search reports the exact communities for each of the possible weight settings. We devise an elegant index structure to maintain the dominance relationships, based on which two algorithms are developed to efficiently compute the top-$j$ MACs. The efficiency and scalability of our algorithms and the effectiveness of MAC model are demonstrated by extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic road-social networks.
Primavera, invierno, primavera. Los ciclos de luchas feministas y la izquierda uruguaya
Ana Laura de Giorgi
La relación entre la izquierda y el feminismo ha sido de encuentros y desencuentros. Este diálogo entrecortado también ha impactado en los estudios sobre uno y otro proyecto emancipatorio. Los estudios sobre la izquierda se han centrado en múltiples aspectos pero prácticamente no han considerado las ideas y prácticas feministas que emergieron en el seno de la izquierda. Por su parte, los estudios sobre los feminismos han tomado la misma distancia: se han estudiado organizaciones e ideas como si no tuvieran vínculo alguno con la izquierda. Este artículo tiene como principal objetivo comprender al feminismo en esa relación, analizando el caso uruguayo donde resulta imprescindible considerar ambos proyectos de forma conjunta, principalmente para los 80, pero también en la actualidad.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Presentación
Hernán Camarero
Presentación
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Rock’n’Roll and the Discontents of Communism
Adrian Popan
The literature on rock music in socialism oscillates between presenting it in opposition to the socialist society and being part of it. This article tackles the same question by looking at the moments where rock musicians found themselves at odds with mainstream morality: the scandals. Three cases have been selected for analysis: the media campaign against the band Chromatic in 1970, the publication of Ceauşescu’s Theses of July in 1971, and the continuing stream of defectors, including from the rock music scene. The analysis concludes that both sides tended to avoid open confrontations. Rock musicians were no dissidents; they preferred to make music using the available institutional means. Authorities would rather close an eye to problematic events to keep up appearances. Mid-level authorities served as mediators while working for their own benefit.
Socialism is not Enough: Race, Feminism, Religion, War, and Eugene Debs
G. Dorrien
One-factor socialism is not enough, and never was, contrary to the Marxian orthodoxy that proletarian struggle is the cure for all social ills. The Socialist Party, even when it tried to support reform causes, was always hampered by its orthodoxy that reform movements are secondary, bourgeois, and distracting. The party attracted notable Black and female leaders who tried to overcome these obstacles and mostly failed. Then the party was viciously persecuted for opposing America’s entry into World I and blown apart by the meteor of world communism.
Divorce Trends in Seven Countries Over the Long Transition from State Socialism: 1981–2004
J. Härkönen, S. Billingsley, M. Hornung
The collapse of communism was a defining geopolitical event of late-twentieth century Europe, with well-documented economic, social, and political implications. Yet there is a striking absence of research on how it influenced divorce. The objective of this study is to provide an exploratory analysis of trends in divorce over the long transition from communism—starting from the decline of the communist economy in the 1980s and ending with economic revival—in seven countries: Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Russia. We discuss how the transition could be expected to either increase or decrease divorce risks. We analyze retrospective micro-level data on first marriages from the Changing Life Course Regimes in Eastern Europe (CLiCR) dataset. Based on our event-history analyses, we find that divorce rates increased in each country at some stage during the long transition and these increases cannot be explained by compositional change of the marriages. However, no uniform pattern emerged in the timing and duration of the increase in divorce risk. This striking variation leads us to conclude that even the effect of major societal ruptures is contextually contingent.
9 sitasi
en
Political Science
The Utopian Internet, Computing, Communication, and Concrete Utopias: Reading William Morris, Peter Kropotkin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and P.M. in the Light of Digital Socialism
C. Fuchs
This paper asks: What can we learn from literary communist utopias for the creation and organisation of communicative and digital socialist society and a utopian Internet? To provide an answer to this question, the article discusses aspects of technology and communication in utopian-communist writings and reads these literary works in the light of questions concerning digital technologies and 21st-century communication. The selected authors have written some of the most influential literary communist utopias. The utopias presented by these authors are the focus of the reading presented in this paper: William Morris’s (1890/1993) News from Nowhere, Peter Kropotkin’s (1892/1995) The Conquest of Bread, Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1974/2002) The Dispossessed, and P.M.’s (1983/2011; 2009; 2012) bolo’bolo and Kartoffeln und Computer (Potatoes and Computers). These works are the focus of the reading presented in this paper and are read in respect to three themes: general communism, technology and production, communication and culture. The paper recommends features of concrete utopian-communist stories that can inspire contemporary political imagination and socialist consciousness. The themes explored include the role of post-scarcity, decentralised computerised planning, wealth and luxury for all, beauty, creativity, education, democracy, the public sphere, everyday life, transportation, dirt, robots, automation, and communist means of communication (such as the “ansible”) in digital communism. The paper develops a communist allocation algorithm needed in a communist economy for the allocation of goods based on the decentralised satisfaction of needs. Such needs-satisfaction does not require any market. It is argued that socialism/communism is not just a post-scarcity society but also a post-market and post-exchange society.