Facebook is building a hidden, bot-only platform to learn about trolls and scammers

Facebook wants to stop people from abusing its system, so it’s making a world of bots that can imitate them. Company researchers have released a paper on a “Web Enabled Simulation” (WES) for testing the platform — basically a shadow Facebook where nonexistent users can like, share, and friend (or harass, abuse, and scam) away from human eyes.

Facebook describes building a scaled-down, walled-off simulation of its platform populated by fake users modeling different kinds of real behavior. For example, a “scammer” bot might be trained to connect with “target” bots that exhibit behaviors similar to real-life Facebook scam victims. Other bots might be trained to invade fake users’ privacy or seek out “bad” content that breaks Facebook’s...

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