Re:Procedural content generation: creating a universe (2015)
by Impossible on Monday June 10, 2019 @07:19PM
(#20151807)
James Ryan's Talk of the Town does this
https://www.jamesryan.world/projects#/talktown/
https://github.com/james-owen-ryan/talktown. His PHD thesis on curated story worlds is here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330855103_Curating_...) with a good write up by Emily Short here (https://emshort.blog/2019/05/21/curating-simulated-storyworl...). The focus is on generating interesting narratives for games and stories, rather than social network simulation or research, but many of the techniques probably apply.
The harder part is probably procedurally generating believable social activity to communicate those relationships to an observer with enough variety to be interesting.