Platform
Four layers between raw behaviour and a defensible answer.
Nothing in Project SIMS is generated from a demographic assumption. Each layer below only ever narrows or describes what was already recorded — which is what makes the output auditable back to a source.
Layer one
The lake
Longitudinal behavioural data collected from the platforms themselves — posts, engagement, follows, comments — resolved into cross-platform identities.
Resolved identities
One person, several handles. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X linked where the evidence supports it.
Follower edges
Recorded relationships, not a generated graph. This is the substrate opinion travels along.
Audience reactions
Real comments on cohort members' content — how their audience actually answers back.
Voice exemplars
Captions and posts kept verbatim and embedded, so register is retrieved rather than imitated.
Layer two
Two catalogs, never pooled
Creator cohorts describe people who post. Audience cohorts describe people who watch — grouped by which creators they actually comment on. They answer different questions, so we keep them in separate catalogs and never average across them.
Creator catalog
485
People who post, described by what they post about, how often, and at what reach. Useful when the question is about how a message travels.
Audience catalog
652
People who watch, grouped from 8.4M recorded comment relationships across 853K people and 145K creators. Useful when the question is about how a message lands.
Co-engagement, not tags
Audience cohorts come from a person × creator matrix, inverse-frequency weighted and dimensionality-reduced. Grouping by hashtag clusters tagging behaviour; grouping by who-watches-whom clusters actual audiences.
k ≥ 100 floor
No cohort is published below 100 real accounts. Smaller groupings are discarded rather than shipped thin.
Topic signature
Hashtags, keywords, sounds and challenges with post counts and member counts attached — never a bare label.
Behavioural distribution
Posting cadence, reach percentiles, engagement per post, commercial rate. Distributions, not averages.
Stated limits
Each pack names its own skew. Creator cohorts are labelled as skewing toward performers, because they do.
What a pack actually contains
# Persona 0 — US TikTok creator cohort AGGREGATE of 369 real US accounts (k>=100 floor). Not a person. All figures are observed behaviour. ## What they talk about dog (2658 posts, 224 of members) dogsoftiktok (1640 posts, 94 of members) catsoftiktok (1025 posts, 71 of members) ## How they behave Posting volume: median 33 posts / 12mo (mean 47.6) Audience size: median 76,120 (p25 14,912, p75 273,417) Engagement/post: 21,624 likes · 167 comments · 2,044 shares Commercial activity: 7.39% of posts are ads
Layer three
Simulation
A study samples independent draws from each cohort. Every draw is a fresh sample conditioned on the cohort's evidence — not the same agent asked repeatedly until it agrees with itself.
Independent draws
Each response is generated in isolation at full temperature. Within-cohort disagreement is the point, not noise to be smoothed away.
Evidence-conditioned
The prompt is the cohort's own pack, its verbatim posts, and how its audience actually responds. No demographic scaffolding is added.
Graph propagation
Reactions spread along recorded follower edges over successive rounds, so a message that only lands with a hub behaves differently from one that lands broadly.
Layer four
Validation
A simulation is worth exactly what its validation is worth — so the platform reports intervals, baselines, and nulls with the same prominence as the wins.
Wilson intervals, always
Every reported share carries a 95% interval over draws. Differences narrower than the overlap are reported as no difference.
Trivial baselines
Results are scored against a no-persona arm and a majority-class arm. A model that cannot beat those has not earned the word 'prediction'.
Backtesting
Because the lake is longitudinal, a forecast can be checked against an outcome already recorded — structurally unavailable to a platform whose graph was generated.
Build quality is published
Silhouette, explained variance, max pairwise centroid cosine and the count of merged undersized clusters are shown on the catalog itself — including when a number is unflattering.