Facebook's 'alternate reality' platform to test illegal social media activity via bots

In an attempt to counter harassment, bullying, scamming and other illegal activities on its platform, Facebook has come up with a unique way of using artificial intelligence to mirror the app and create an alternate reality to test and study unhealthy social media behaviour. 

Researchers of the social networking giant have developed Web-Enabled Simulation (WES), a large-scale replica of Facebook which would imitate the features of the app in real-time. On this platform, researchers plan to let loose 'innocent' and 'bad' bots mirroring ordinary profiles and predators online.

 "The WES approach can automatically explore complicated scenarios in a simulated environment. While the project is in a research-only stage at the moment, the hope is that one day it will help us improve our services and spot potential reliability or integrity issues before they affect real people using the platform," said Mark Harman, the lead Facebook research scientist in his blog. 

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According to Facebook, WES would help them study and track illegal behaviour on their platform without actually targeting innocent people or causing any harm in the real world. Through this parallel world, Facebook would be able to use AI to sharpen their intelligence to track and tackle problematic accounts in the real world.

"We apply 'speed bumps' to the actions and observations our bots can perform and so quickly explore the possible changes that we could make to the products to inhibit harmful behaviour without hurting normal behaviour," said Mark Harman. 

According to the researchers, AI would be roped in to track 'bad' bots based on a number of factors such as the number of private messages they send, visits on-page, searchers etc. They will then assess various counter-measures to test those that can most effectively stop or even prevent the undesirable behaviours.

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