Coexistence of Prosocial Platform Design with High Engagement and User Satisfaction

Determine whether social media platform designs intended to foster prosocial outcomes—such as constructive, inclusive, and respectful discourse—can coexist with high user engagement and user satisfaction.

Background

The paper introduces a generative social simulation that embeds LLM agents into an agent-based model to examine whether proposed prosocial interventions can mitigate structural dysfunctions of social media, such as ideological homophily, attention inequality, and amplification of extreme voices.

While several interventions showed modest benefits, none resolved all issues and some produced trade-offs, leading the authors to emphasize that they did not model the user experience. Against this backdrop, they explicitly state that the central question of whether prosocial design can be achieved without sacrificing engagement and satisfaction remains unanswered.

References

The key question of whether prosocial design can coexist with high engagement and user satisfaction remains unanswered.

— Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social Simulation  (2508.03385 - Larooij et al., 5 Aug 2025) in Section: Discussion and Conclusion (Limitations)

We do not know whether we can trust platforms to engage in these reduction practices thoughtfully, in ways that produce a robust but fairer public sphere.

— Democracy Needs Reach: Political Equality, Online Speech, and Algorithmic Recommendation  (2609.09465 - Brown, 8 Sep 2026) in Section 5, Conclusion