Article: Online Deception in Social Media

The explosive growth of social media applications has revolutionized the way we interact with one another. However, the emergence and use of this online environment has also created new opportunities for deception. We present a brief comparison between traditional (i.e., offline) deception and online deception with a focus on social media. Furthermore, we explore some of the factors that can affect the difficulty in achieving deception in social media and we use a deception model to classify different online deception techniques. We also discuss the ease of deployment and success of these techniques. Finally, we highlight some challenges that social media designers must address in the future to protect social media users from online deception.