An agent architecture for simulating communication dynamics in social media

Abstract

Social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ have become important communication channels. Nonetheless, the distribution and dynamics of that communication make it difficult to analyze and understand. To overcome this, we propose an agent architecture for modeling and simulating user behavior to analyze communication dynamics in social media. Our agent decision-making method utilizes sociological actor types to represent motivations of media users and their impact on communicative behavior. We apply this concept to a simulation of real world Twitter communication accompanying a German television program. Our evaluation shows that the agent architecture is capable of simulating communication dynamics in human media usage.