Digital Deception: How to Spot a Lie Online

By Tom van Laer, City University London
Jun 29, 2016 9:58 AMNov 19, 2019 12:38 AM
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(Credit: albund/Shutterstock)

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There are three things you can be sure of in life: death, taxes – and lying. The latter certainly appears to have been borne out by the UK’s recent Brexit referendum, with a number of the Leave campaign’s pledges looking more like porkie pies than solid truths.

But from internet advertising, visa applications and academic articles to political blogs, insurance claims and dating profiles, there are countless places we can tell digital lies. So how can one go about spotting these online fibs? Well, Stephan Ludwig from the University of Westminster, Ko de Ruyter from City University London’s Cass Business School, Mike Friedman of the Catholic University of Louvain, and yours truly have developed a digital lie detector – and it can uncover a whole host of internet untruths.

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