Facebook tries to prevent malicious users from abusing its system, in every way. For this reason it creates a world of bots that can mimic what is happening in the larger one social network.
Researchers at the company have published a paper called "Web-enabled Simulation" or "Web Enabled Simulation” (WES) for the essay of 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 to “target” bots that display behaviors similar to real victims scams on Facebook.
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 detect various bugs, or even learn from bots' behaviors. Researchers can create WES users whose sole goal is to steal information from other bots. If they suddenly find ways to access more data, this could indicate that there is a vulnerability that fraudsters can exploit.
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).
Ωστόσο, οι ερευνητές προειδοποιούν ότι “τα bots πρέπει να απομονωθούν κατάλληλα από τους πραγματικούς χρήστες για να διασφαλιστεί ότι η simulation, αν και εκτελείται σε πραγματικό 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".