Web Of Deception: Misinformation On The Internet

Abstract

The study was carried out to determine if Misinformation and Deception exist on the Internet. The survey technique was adopted for this study . The respondents were Academic staff of Computer Science Department, staff of the Central Records Processing Unit, staff of the University Network, and also final year Students of Computer Science Department, all of the university of Benin, Benin - City. The data was collated and analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (S PSS). Results showed that the web is truly deceptive and misinfo rmation exists on the internet, in different guises such as Parodies/spoofs, malicious misinformation, promotion of false products on commercial sites, personal opinions presented as facts, and also E -mail hoaxes. This study also revealed that the problem of misinformation is greatly reduced since most people do not believe every information they read on the internet, and also that most of our respondents take time to check the authorship/sources of where they get information from. Recommendations for checking misinformation on the internet include, among others, ensuring qual ity control on websites, this is don e by proper scrutiny of the information we get from the internet.

Key Words: Misinformation, Deception, Internet, Deceptive, quality control, survey