MIDSim: Simulating Multi-Channel Information Diffusion in Social Media with LLM-Powered Multi-Agent System

Abstract: Information diffusion in social media shapes public opinion and collective behavior, making its modeling and simulation an important research problem. Existing studies have investigated information diffusion through epidemic-based, cascade-based, and point process models. However, they predominantly focus on diffusion through social links, overlooking other diffusion channels enabled by platform algorithms (e.g., recommender systems) and failing to capture user behavioral complexity. To address these limitations, we propose an LLM-powered multi-agent system for simulating multi-channel information diffusion, where LLMs instantiate personalized user agents and the diffusion process jointly models social and algorithmic exposure streams. We further construct three real-world diffusion dataset spanning Sina Weibo, RedNote, and Twitter, containing diffusion records, user profiles, historical posts, and social relationships. Experimental results on real diffusion events show that our proposed framework realistically simulate macro diffusion phenomenon and generate diverse comment content, significantly outperforming baselines.