Facebook tries to prevent malicious users from abusing its system in any way. For this reason it creates a world of bots that can mimic what is happening on the larger social network.
Researchers at the company have published a paper called "Web-enabled Simulation" or "Web Enabled Simulation”(WES) for testing the platform.
It is basically a shady Facebook where non-existent users can like, share, and make friends (or harass others or create and run scams). All this away from the human eye.
Facebook describes the creation of a scaler simulations of its platform, consisting of fake users possessing different species realbehavior. For example, a “scammer” bot can be trained to connect with “target” bots that display behaviors similar to actual Facebook scam victims.
Other bots may be trained to invade the privacy of fake users or to serve "bad" content that violates Facebook rules.
Software simulations are obviously common, and Facebook is creating a previously automated testing tool called Sapienz.
This could help Facebook identify various things errors, ή και να μάθει από τις συμπεριφορές των bots. Οι ερευνητές μπορούν να δημιουργήσουν χρήστες WES των οποίων ο μοναδικός στόχος είναι να κλέψουν πληροφορίες από άλλα bots. Αν ξαφνικά βρουν τρόπους για να αποκτήσουν access σε περισσότερα δεδομένα, αυτό θα μπορούσε να υποδηλώνει ότι υπάρχει μια ευπάθεια που μπορούν να εκμεταλλευτούν οι απατεώνες.
Facebook wants to create a whole parallel social environment. Within this large-scale fake network, they will be able to develop "completely isolated bots that can perform arbitrary actions" and will be able to model the way with which regular users respond to the platform (this has been done again in real users).
However, the researchers caution that “bots must be properly isolated from real users to ensure that the simulation, although performed in real code platform, will not lead to unexpected interactions between bots and real users”.
Facebook calls the WW system, which is an abbreviation of "WES World".
