Digital deception: When, where and how people lie online
Abstract
The prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives has given rise to an important set of questions at the intersection of deception and technology, referred to as ‘digital deception’. These questions include issues concerned with deception and self-presentation, such as how the Internet can facilitate deception through the manipulation of identity. A second set of questions is concerned with how we produce lies. For example, do we lie more in our everyday conversations in some media than in others? Do we use different media to lie about different types of things, to different types of people? This article examines these questions by first elaborating on the notion of digital deception in the context of the literature on traditional forms of deception. It considers identity-based forms of deception online and the lies that are a frequent part of our everyday communications.