Uncovering Deception in Social Media

A Special Issue in Springer Journal Social Network Analysis and Mining

Guest Editors: Huan Liu (ASU), Jiawei Han (UIUC), and Hiroshi Motoda (Osaka University)

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.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following

* Forms of deceptions: disinformation, misinformation, honeypot accounts, wiki-circularity, and impersonation
* Features associated with deceptions: linguistic features, interactive features, etc.
* Sources of deceptions: adversaries, hoax, privacy related, white lies, sites of special interests/design
* Handling deceptions: assessment, detection, prediction, and tracking
* Deception theories and practices: how extant social and psychological theories can be adapted to social media study, new needs of social media
* Data for deception research: benchmarks, and data of good practice
* Performance evaluation: evolving nature of deception, ground truth, and metrics
* Applications: Health, Cybersecurity, Online Search, Online Advertisement, Online Communications,
* Related topics: provenance, trust, credibility, spam, gaming, and fraud

For submission, please visit http://www.editorialmanager.com/snam/ by selecting Article Type “S.I.: Uncovering Deception in Social Media”

Important Dates: Submissions due on June 15, 2013 extended to July 15, 2013; Review results due on September 15, 2013; Manuscripts due on November 15, 2013; Expected publication date – early 2014.