## 1 Introduction  
Recently, social platforms have emerged to meet the social and entertainment needs of elderly individuals who have been exposed to social e-commerce. For example, OldKids, the first and by far the largest virtual platform for seniors in mainland China, provides online and offline computer training for seniors and a virtual space where seniors can interact [1]. Tangdou, another famous elderly social platform with RMB 100 million in financing gathers elderly square dance fans, provides square dance teaching services, and promotes interaction among platform members [2]. For an emerging elderly social platform, a certain number of users on the platform is a prerequisite for commercial returns, such as revenue from paid services, revenue from sponsors and advertising revenue, etc. [2, 3, 4]. Therefore, managers of social platforms use a variety of strategies to promote customer adoption and the participation of social platform, such as publishing promotional messages in mass media [5, 6], frequently initiating high-quality interactive services with platform users [7, 8, 9] that cause users to spread word of mouth (WOM) spontaneously and cultivating opinion leaders to enhance the frequency and influence of their WOM [10, 11]. Prior research has provided valuable insights into the effectiveness of social platform promotion strategies. For example, [PERSON] (2007) [12] confirmed the impact of the quality of the online interactive services on the customer adoption of social platforms with users of successful virtual platforms (e.g., [[http://tw.club.yahoo.com](http://tw.club.yahoo.com)]([http://tw.club.yahoo.com](http://tw.club.yahoo.com)), accessed on 28 July 2005) as samples. [PERSON] et al. (2015) [13] confirmed the influential power of opinion leaders on consumer trust and adoption of social media platforms with undergraduate students as samples. However, the users of the social platforms studied by scholars are mainly young people, and studies that focus exclusively on the elderly are rare. There are significant differences in digital literacy levels within the elderly intergenerational group compared to the younger group. A major part of seniors are passive information receivers (PIRs), who are unskilled in searching for information online and neglect information from sources other than their personal relationships [14; 15; 16]. The remaining seniors are active information seekers (AISs), who are proficient in searching for information and thus utilize information from multiple digital sources to meet their needs [17]. In terms of the microprocess of senior social platform adoption, the effectiveness of promotional strategies may be closely related to the information seeking abilities and sources of information of the elderly. For example, the awareness of mass media messages is related to the information seeking ability of the target group [18]. The degree to which potential users perceive the service quality of online platform correlates with the amount of information they have [19]. Therefore, it is necessary to dissect the process of social platform adoption from a digital literacy perspective and to examine in depth the impact of the proportion of PIRs of the older population on the macro-outcomes of social platform adoption (market penetration) and how the impact of these strategies on market penetration varies in different proportions of PIRs. The scarcity of data on senior platform operations creates challenges for research using empirical methods and the heterogeneity among individuals (the digital literacy divide of older adults) makes mathematical modeling inapplicable as well. Agent-based modeling is considered ideal for simulating complex phenomena resulting from the interaction of heterogeneous individuals driven by multiple factors and allowing researchers to overcome the limitations imposed by analytical tractability and lack of data [20; 21].