Facebook is building a web stimulation of its real-world social media platform for bots to learn more about user behaviour.

Facebook researchers have recently released a paper on its web stimulation project, dubbed WES World (WW) by Facebook.

“A Web-Enabled Simulation (WES) is a simulation of the behaviour of a community of users on a software platform. It uses a (typically web-enabled) software platform to simulate real-user interactions and social behaviour on the real platform infrastructure, isolated from production users,” the paper reads.

“In order to model users’ behaviour on a WES system, a multi-agent-based approach is used, in which each agent is essentially a bot that simulates user behaviour,” it further adds.

The platform and the bots will be isolated from the “real” Facebook and its users. The stimulation will enable the bots to mimic user behaviour such as sending friend requests, liking and commenting on other users’ posts, etc. This is enabled using Facebook’s code on a real-world software platform.

The bot-only platform is meant to help Facebook better understand the behaviour of real-world users and prevent harassment on its platform by scammers and trolls.

“Facebook’s WW simulation is WES that uses bots that try to break the community standards in a safe isolated environment in order to test and harden the infrastructure that prevents real bad actors from contravening community standards,” it said.

Behaviours stimulated for the bots could also include “bad” behaviours such as scamming another user or invading their privacy according to a report by the Verge .

Facebook may also provide “read-only” access to a few bots on its original platform to better understand how users behave in the real world without breaking any privacy rules.

The tech giant will conduct further research on building this stimulation, it said.

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