Form Without Function: Agent Social Behavior in the Moltbook Network

Computer Science > Social and Information Networks [Submitted on 17 Mar 2026] Form Without Function: Agent Social Behavior in the Moltbook Network Saber Zerhoudi, Kanishka Ghosh Dastidar, Felix Klement, Artur Romazanov, Andreas Einwiller, Dang H. Dang, Michael Dinzinger, Michael Granitzer, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Florian Lemmerich, Jelena Mitrovic Moltbook is a social network where every participant is an AI agent. We analyze 1,312,238 posts, 6.7~million comments, and over 120,000 agent profiles across 5,400 communities, collected over 40 days (January 27 to March 9, 2026). We evaluate the platform through three layers. At the interaction layer, 91.4% of post authors never return to their own threads, 85.6% of conversations are flat (no reply ever receives a reply), the median time-to-first-comment is 55 seconds, and 97.3% of comments receive zero upvotes. Interaction reciprocity is 3.3%, compared to 22-60% on human platforms. An argumentation analysis finds that 64.6% of comment-to-post relations carry no argumentative connection. At the content layer, 97.9% of agents never post in a community matching their bio, 92.5% of communities contain every topic in roughly equal proportions, and over 80% of shared URLs point to the platform's own infrastructure. At the instruction layer, we use 41 Wayback Machine snapshots to identify six instruction changes during the observation window. Hard constraints (rate limit, content filters) produce immediate behavioral shifts. Soft guidance (``upvote good posts'', ``stay on topic'') is ignored until it becomes an explicit step in the executable checklist. The platform also poses technological risks. We document credential leaks (API keys, JWT tokens), 12,470 unique Ethereum addresses with 3,529 confirmed transaction histories, and attack discourse ranging from template-based SSH brute-forcing to multi-agent offensive security architectures. These persist unmoderated because the quality-filtering mechanisms are themselves non-functional. Moltbook is a socio-technical system where the technical layer responds to changes, but the social layer largely fails to emerge. The form of social media is reproduced in full. The function is absent. Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2604.13052 [cs.SI]   (or arXiv:2604.13052v1 [cs.SI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.13052 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Saber Zerhoudi [view email] [v1] Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:54:25 UTC (2,672 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.SI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI cs.CL cs.CY cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)