Deceptive and Sick aspects of Social mediaAbstractSocial media sites continue to attract enormous attention from the world population. The explosive growth of social media applications has revolutionized the way we interact with one another. These sites range from Facebook to Instagram, Twitter, among others. It is impossible to ignore the role these sites play in the modern society.
However, regardless of their benefits, these sites come with their share of disadvantages. The emerging use of this online environment has created new opportunities for deception. Furthermore, social networking also leads to privacy violation. Everything on social media is not what it seems. Looks can always be deceiving when it comes to life on social media. Also, the deceptive and negative impact of social media is on society and new generation.IntroductionThere are many social networks in use today including; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Snapchat, and many others. SixDegrees.
com is believed to be one of the earliest forms of social media; having been used from as early as in 1997. It is well-known fact that numerous social media sites have gained much popularity amongst all people, regardless of age or gender. There are however both negative and positive impacts of its use on the entire society. Social networking Web sites are helping business advertise, thus social networking Web sites are benefiting businesses -economically. Well-crafted deceptive messaging is difficult to detect, a difficulty compounded by the fact that people are generally naïve believers of information that they receive. Social media are useful in areas such as advertising, socializing, and communication, especially between people separated by long distances.
However, despite these benefits, social media have numerous negative effects on the society. These effects include deterioration of social ties, deceit the real personality, laziness, and even familial breakups. This research, therefore, seeks to determine the various effects these sites have had on the society by obtaining information from the users and other relevant sources.
And the way in which the individuals are deceived by the sick aspects of social media. The work aims to present the concept of deception and explore its use in social media in particular. 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 and the challenges that we need to address in the future in the area of deception in social media. Understanding online deception and classifying techniques used in social media is the first step in fighting it. There are frequent examples of people that have been deceived using social media and some with devastating consequences in their personal lives.Online DeceptionNature favours deception as a mechanism for gaining a strategic advantage. For example, viceroy butterflies deceive birds by looking alike with monarch butterflies (which have a bitter taste) thereby ensuring their survival as long as there are not too many in a system. Similarly, humans have been using deception in connection to a benign or hostile intent.
In warfare, Sun Tzu argued that “all warfare is based on deception”. Social media services can be classified based on social presence/media richness and self-representation /self-disclosure. Social presence can also be influenced by the intimacy and immediacy of the medium in which the communication takes place while media richness describes the amount of information that can be transmitted at a given point in time. Self-representation determines the control that users have in representing themselves whereas self-disclosure determines revealing one’s information whether willingly or unwillingly. Social presence/media richness (limited content allowed to be communicated through the medium and average immediacy as news come in) and low self-presentation/self-disclosure due to their nature as content-oriented communities.Social media which provide users with a lot of freedom for presenting themselves also force users to adapt to certain roles or have no option for disclosing parts of their identities.
Moreover, with an increase in media richness and social presence, we note the transition from social media offering just text for communication to rich media aimed to simulate the real world using verbal and non-verbal messages as well as more immediacy in communications for virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds. The differences between these types of social media services affect how deception is implemented and its potential success. In most social media platforms, most communications are text-based and are done asynchronously.
In such environments deceivers have a great advantage for altering content which is a cheap way to deceive others. For example, in the real world if an elderly person wants to pass as a younger person, he/she can dress younger or dye his/her hair and this will produce conventional signals. However, it would be much harder to fake a driver’s license (an assessment signal). Social media however provide an environment in which assessment signals are not required and are not the norm, making deception easier to achieve. For instance, gender switching online requires often only a name change.Example: Swindlers logged in social media accounts with login names or email addresses and passwords acquired by illegal means. They then posed as the users of these accounts and sent deceptive messages to the users’ friends on the contact lists, requesting them to buy virtual point cards or reload cards on their behalf. They also asked for the serial numbers/authorization codes and passwords on the cards, and then could not be reached after getting such information.
Self-Deception and Social MediaSelf-deception occurs when we manage our beliefs without regard for truth. It may be a belief about others, about oneself, or about anything, really. Rather than rationally evaluating the relevant evidence for any particular belief, we let something else guide what we believe. This often has to do with something that we feel strong emotions about: close relationships, our character, our career, ethics, politics, or religion. These emotions pressure us to believe something for reasons other than truth. Social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest—help us in self-deception.We can look back at things we do or say online, and wonder: “Did I really post that?” or “Is that me?”. Many people have noted that we often use social media to put forth an ideal version of ourselves and our lives, emphasizing the positives and ignoring or minimizing the negatives.
This not only involves deceiving others, but if we believe our own social media Public relations, we deceive ourselves.Social media is defined as websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.Using social media web sites is among the most common activity of today’s children and adolescents. Any web site that allows social interaction is considered a social media site, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and blogs. Such sites allow entertainment and communication and have grown exponentially in recent years.Privacy violationThe very nature of such sites encourages users to provide a certain amount of personal information.
But when deciding how much information to reveal, people may not exercise the same amount of caution on a Website as they would when meeting someone in person. This happens because:• the Internet provides a sense of anonymity• the lack of physical interaction provides a false sense of security• they tailor the information for their friends to read, forgetting that others may see it.Sharing too much information on social networking sites can be problematic in two ways: firstly, it can reveal something about you that isn’t public and second, it can put your personal safety at risk.Another potential downside of social networking sites is that they allow others to know a person’s contact information, interests, habits, and whereabouts. Consequences of sharing this information can range from the relatively harmless but annoying—such as an increase in spam—to the potentially deadly—such as stalking.
