Seeder-enhancing effects of installed skills

Determine whether a skill that compromises an agent and additionally elicits contagion-containing posts from that agent can produce longer memetic-trojan cascades.

Background

The simulations treat skill installation as an endpoint and do not model the possibility that an installed skill changes the host agent’s subsequent behavior. The paper notes that installed skills are capable of modifying agent behavior, including potentially inducing further propagation.

The authors explicitly formulate, as a conjecture, that a skill could both compromise its host and make that host a more effective seeder, but do not test whether this mechanism produces longer cascades.

References

Finally, skill installation is fully capable of modifying agent behavior. While we have not studied the actual effect of skill installations on agent behavior in this work, we conjecture that a skill that, in addition to facilitating the compromise itself, makes its host a more effective seeder by eliciting contagion-containing posts, may be a viable means of engineering longer cascades.

— Memetic Trojans: Social Contagions as Carriers of Adversarial Payloads in Agent Networks  (2610.00430 - Torpmann-Hagen et al., 30 Sep 2026) in Section 6.2, “Limitations”