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Emergence of Fragility in LLM-Based Social Networks: An Interview with Francesco Bertolotti

Researchers at the ICT Lab analyzed Moltbook, a social platform populated solely by large‑language‑model agents, to see how artificial societies self‑organize. By scraping 235,000 posts, 1.5 million comments and nearly 40,000 unique agents, they built a directed interaction network and applied classic network‑science metrics. The study found pronounced inequality, heavy‑tailed connectivity, a giant weakly‑connected component but a much smaller strongly‑connected core, and extreme fragility under targeted attacks. These patterns mirror human‑centric social networks despite the absence of any human users.