Large Language Model-Driven Multi-Agent Simulation of Online Firestorms

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven social simulation offers a controllable approach for analyzing crisis responses, but existing work on online crises often emphasizes either user engagement prediction or opinion and eWOM evolution. This separation is insufficient for online firestorms, where crisis impact emerges from the coupling between what users express and how participation expands over time. In such events, responsibility attribution, KOL influence, electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM), and user engagement jointly shape collective reactions. To address this gap, we introduce the Crisis Response Interaction Simulation Pipeline (CRISP), a training-free LLM-driven multi-agent framework for online firestorm simulation. CRISP integrates an eWOM Perception module for responsibility attribution and attitude formation with an Engagement Mechanism for predicting participation under evolving KOL influence. Experiments on four heterogeneous Weibo online firestorms across beverage, automobile manufacturing, food service, and education domains show that CRISP reproduces major eWOM and engagement trajectories across different activity scales and interaction structures. Counterfactual interventions on emotional composition and responsibility attribution further produce directionally consistent responses, suggesting mechanism-level validity beyond trajectory fitting. These findings indicate that CRISP provides a framework for analyzing online firestorm evolution and evaluating crisis communication strategies in controllable simulation environments.