Facebook Buildding a hidden Feature, to teach us more about ourselves. This may lock trolls and scams.
Facebook wants to stop people from abusing its system, so it's creating a world of bots that can mimic them. To test the platform, the company's researchers released a paper on "Web Enabled Simulation" (WES) - basically a shadow Facebook where users who don't have a human eye want to share, or friend (or harass, abuse and scam).
Facebook describes building a scaled-down, wall-off simulation of its platform, with fake users modeling different types of real behavior. For example, a "scammer" bot can be trained to connect with "target" bots that display similar behaviors to real-life Facebook scam victims. Other bots may be trained to attack fake users' privacy or search for "bad" content that violates Facebook rules.
It helps to detect Facebook bugs. Researchers can build WES users, whose sole purpose is to steal information from other bots, and keep them loose in the system. If they suddenly find ways to access more data after the update, it implies that human scammers are vulnerable to exploitation and that real users are unaffected.
Here Facebook building a world of artificial personality units designed to teach us more about ourselves. While researchers limit these interactions for the sake of real users, they also help with any catastrophic existential crises in bots. It's only fair, because if you're building a fake universe full of little creatures that don't know their true nature, you're basically guaranteed to be in a remake of World on Wire and living in imitation. Yourself.
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