BotSim: LLM-Powered Malicious Social Botnet Simulation

Abstract: Social media platforms like X(Twitter) and Reddit are vital to global communication. However, advancements in LLM technology give rise to social media bots with unprecedented intelligence. These bots adeptly simulate human profiles, conversations, and interactions, disseminating large amounts of false information and posing significant challenges to platform regulation. To better understand and counter these threats, we innovatively design BotSim, a malicious social botnet simulation powered by LLM. BotSim mimics the information dissemination patterns of real-world social networks, creating a virtual environment composed of intelligent agent bots and real human users. In the temporal simulation constructed by BotSim, these advanced agent bots autonomously engage in social interactions such as posting and commenting, effectively modeling scenarios of information flow and user interaction. Building on the BotSim framework, we construct a highly human-like, LLM-driven bot dataset called BotSim-24 and benchmark multiple bot detection strategies against it. The experimental results indicate that detection methods effective on traditional bot datasets perform worse on BotSim-24, highlighting the urgent need for new detection strategies to address the cybersecurity threats posed by these advanced bots.