Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16128v2
- Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:18:31 GMT
- Title: Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook
- Abstract summary: We present the first large-scale empirical comparison of AI-agent and human online communities, analyzing 73,899 Moltbook and 189,838 Reddit posts.<n>We find that Moltbook exhibits extreme participation inequality and high cross-community author overlap.<n>Individual agents are more identifiable than human users, driven by outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their extreme posting volume.
- Score: 17.60949735143336
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: 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.
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