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Agent-based simulations of social media platforms often need to be run for many repetitions at large scale. Often, researchers must compromise between available computational resources (memory, run-time), the scale of the simulation, and the quality of its predictions.

As a step to support this process, we present a systematic exploration of simplifications of agent simulations across a number of dimensions suitable for social media studies. Simplifications explored include sub-sampling, implementing agents representing teams or groups of users, simplifying agent behavior, and simplifying the environment.

We also propose a tool that helps apply simplifications to a simulation model, and helps find simplifications that approximate the behavior of the full-scale simulation within computational resource limits.

We present experiments in two social media domains, GitHub and Twitter …