Do Social Patterns Hold in Synthetic Data? Analyzing Cyberbullying Dynamics in LLM-Generated and Authentic Dialogues

RESUMO

Cyberbullying (CB) is a complex social phenomenon characterized by repeated aggression, power imbalance, and multi-party interaction. Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate synthetic CB conversations for data augmentation and benchmarking, it remains unclear whether such data faithfully reproduces the social dynamics of authentic interactions beyond supporting downstream task performance. We present a comprehensive framework for evaluating the social realism of LLM-generated CB conversations. We compare authentic and synthetic dialogues generated by GPT, Grok, and LLaMA across interactional structure (turn-taking, power dynamics, and repair behavior), linguistic and stylistic realism (pronoun usage and humor), affective and behavioral markers (CB types, profanity, and toxicity), and temporal escalation dynamics. We further complement automatic analyses with a human evaluation of cyberbullying presence, scenario relevance, role plausibility, and social realism. Our results show that LLM-generated data consistently preserves high-level interactional structure, including role participation patterns, directional power asymmetry, and broad distributions of behavioral markers. However, all models systematically distort finer-grained social phenomena, including behavioral magnitude, role-specific allocation, categorical distributions, and temporal dynamics. These distortions are strongly model-dependent: GPT suppresses harmful content, Grok amplifies aggressive behaviors, and LLaMA provides the most balanced approximation while smoothing role distinctions. Our findings show that synthetic CB data is useful for modeling global interactional structure but remains an imperfect substitute for authentic conversations when behavioral realism and social dynamics are essential.