Online Deception in Social Media

The rapid proliferation of Web-based technologies has revolutionized the way content is generated and exchanged over the Internet leading to an explosive growth in social media applications and services. We consider deception as a deliberate act with the intent to mislead others while the recipients are not made aware or expect that such an act is taking place and that the goal of the deceiver is to transfer that false belief to the deceived ones.

This perspective on deception becomes particularly relevant when examining social media services in which the boundary between protecting one’s privacy and deceiving others becomes blurry.

Furthermore, we also argue that these false beliefs are transferred through verbal and non-verbal communication and deception is measurable and identifiable through verbal (e.g., audio or text), non-verbal (e.g., body movement) and physiological cues (such as heartbeat).

We focus on the motivations for deception in social media and we explore various deception techniques that have been used recently and their impact on social media users. We discuss some of the challenges that we need to address in the future in the area of deception in social media.

While detecting and preventing deception are important aspects that relate to the topic of deception, understanding online deception and classifying techniques used in social media is the first step in fighting it.