Zhengyan Wang

Yongmao Zhang, Kai Qiao, Zhengyan Wang et al.

Modeling social media public opinion evolution is essential for governance decision-making. Traditional epidemic models and rule-based agent-based models (ABMs) fail to capture the cognitive processes and adaptive behaviors of real users. Recent large language model (LLM)-based social simulations can reproduce group-level phenomena like polarization and conformity, yet remain unable to recreate the irrational interactions and multi-phase dynamics of real public opinion events. We present POSIM (Public Opinion Simulator), a multi-agent simulation framework for social media public opinion evolution and governance. POSIM integrates LLM-driven agents with a Belief--Desire--Intention (BDI) cognitive architecture that accounts for irrational factors, places them in a virtual social media environment with social networks and recommendation mechanisms, and drives temporal dynamics through a Hawkes point process engine that captures the co-evolution of agents and the environment across event phases. To validate the framework, we collect real-world public opinion datasets from the Weibo platform covering the full interaction chain of users. Experiments show that POSIM successfully reproduces key characteristics of public opinion evolution from individual mechanisms to collective phenomena, and its effectiveness is further supported by multiple statistical metrics. Building on POSIM, governance-oriented guidance and intervention experiments uncover a counterintuitive empathy paradox: empathetic guidance deepens negative sentiment instead of easing it under certain conditions, offering new insights for governance strategy design. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework can fully serve as a computational experimentation platform for proactive strategy evaluation and evidence-based governance. All source code is available at https://github.com/DeepCogLab/posim/.

Shuhao Shi, Kai Qiao, Zhengyan Wang et al.

The presence of a large number of bots on social media has adverse effects. The graph neural network (GNN) can effectively leverage the social relationships between users and achieve excellent results in detecting bots. Recently, more and more GNN-based methods have been proposed for bot detection. However, the existing GNN-based bot detection methods only focus on low-frequency information and seldom consider high-frequency information, which limits the representation ability of the model. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Multi-scale with Signed-attention Graph Filter for social bot detection called MSGS. MSGS could effectively utilize both high and low-frequency information in the social graph. Specifically, MSGS utilizes a multi-scale structure to produce representation vectors at different scales. These representations are then combined using a signed-attention mechanism. Finally, multi-scale representations via MLP after polymerization to produce the final result. We analyze the frequency response and demonstrate that MSGS is a more flexible and expressive adaptive graph filter. MSGS can effectively utilize high-frequency information to alleviate the over-smoothing problem of deep GNNs. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves better performance compared with several state-of-the-art social bot detection methods.