Facebook decided to prevent people from misusing its platform, which prompted it to build a bot-only social media platform dedicated to understanding user behavior in the real world, so that the new hidden platform mimics the real Facebook platform, but away from human eyes. Facebook researchers issued a research paper on the web simulation project, called (Web Enabled Simulation).
“The project is a simulation of the behavior of a community of users on a software platform,” the paper says. “The project uses a typically web-enabled software system to simulate real user interactions and social behavior on the real platform infrastructure in isolation from real users.”
A bot is an independent program on the Internet capable of interacting with systems or users. The paper adds: “A multi-agent approach is used to model users’ behavior on a Web Enabled Simulation system, where each agent is a bot that simulates user behavior.”
The new platform and bots are supposed to be isolated from the real Facebook platform and its users, and this project allows bots to simulate user behavior, such as sending friend requests, liking and commenting on other users’ posts, in addition to harassment, assault and fraud.
According to Facebook, the primary purpose of the platform is to help it better understand the behavior of real-world users and prevent harassment on its platform by scammers and trolls, so that bots attempt to break community standards in a safe, isolated environment in order to test techniques that prevent real bad people from violating community standards.
The new platform, infused with artificial intelligence, includes bots programmed to act maliciously, deceive another user or violate their privacy, as well as target other users in a manner similar to scammers or bad people on the real Facebook platform. Facebook may provide read-only capabilities to some bots on its original platform in order to better understand how users behave in the real world without violating any privacy rules, but researchers warn that bots must be isolated from real users to ensure that simulations do not lead to unexpected interactions between bots and real users.
The researchers said: “The simulation results could have wide-ranging uses for social media platforms, as community behavior is increasingly prevalent in software applications, such as travel, accommodation, entertainment, and shopping, and these systems use social interactions so that each user can benefit from the collective experience of other users.”
It is noteworthy that earlier this month, Facebook provided geographical location data to researchers to help them know whether people are staying at home or not, and the data also helps predict where the Corona virus will spread next, and this step clearly indicates that Facebook is using the data it collects from 2.5 billion active users monthly to combat the virus.
