Cues to Deception in Social Media Communications

With the increasing reliance on social media as a dominant communication medium for current news and personal communications, communicators are capable of executing deception with relative ease. While past-related research has investigated written deception in traditional forms of computer mediated communication (e.g. email), we are interested determining if those same indicators hold in social media-like communication and if new, social-media specific linguistic cues to deception exist. Our contribution is two-fold: 1) we present results on human subjects experimentation to confirm existing and new linguistic cues to deception; 2) we present results on classifying deception from training machine learning classifiers using our best features to achieve an average 90% accuracy in cross fold validation.