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

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge 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 populate