Uncovering deception in social media

Social media is quickly arising as a new, popular form of media. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are some examples of an inordinate number of social media services that are loved and used by people of all walks of life for various purposes such as sharing news, expressing opinions, documenting thoughts, launching political campaigns, maintaining and developing friendships or professional connection. Some key characteristics of social media include low entry barrier, instant updates (thus, instant gratification), large numbers of friends, open platform, and anonymity. The last two properties make people comfortable to become users but also make social media vulnerable to activities of ill intentions. Deception in social media is an epitome of such activities. Deception is a distortion with an intention to mislead users, analysts, organizations, etc. A distortion can be about content, source, identity, age, sex, or location, among many. Deception is encouraged or made easy by the unique circumstances of social media. Deception is rampant in social media for a wide range of reasons, being an innocent white lie or resulting in a dire consequence where one’s job or life is at stake. Hence, it is important to research deception in social media. It is necessary to uncover deception in social media so that we can improve our awareness and confidence in using social media, design and develop countermeasures to ‘‘separate wheat from chaff’’ to minimize negative impact of deception. This special issue aims to identify issues of deception in social media, review the state-of-the-art research on deception, offer a convenient venue for sharing multi-disciplinary research findings, and identifying pressing issues and future challenges. It is a truly little treaded and relatively new area that crosses different disciplines. Thus, the process of completing this special issue is unusually timeconsuming and labor-intensive: soliciting submissions, enlisting expert reviewers, chasing reviews, revising and re-reviewing, and discussion of paper relevance and selection. With the support of the authors interested in this special issue, altruistic efforts of expert reviewers worldwide, and assistance of the journal office, we are pleased to present three articles that deliberate various issues of uncovering deception. The first article, ‘‘Deception detection: dependable or defective?’’, starts reviewing existing research in deception, in search of answers to intuitive questions such as ‘‘how do human beings tell the differences between truths and lies and void being deceived? And is it possible for a machine to determine the veracity of any given statement or set of statements ...?’’ Among definitions of deception, the authors settle on a definition that leads with intent, and categorize lies as a specialization of deception. They present a comprehensive and concise review on deception detection cues and some empirical results on the effectiveness of these cues. After they elaborate the notion of deception and the relationship of social, psychological, and technical views and point out some research gaps, the authors show deception detection applications in This article is part of the Topical Collection on Uncovering Deception in Social Media.