“This Is the Future of Advertising!” Or Is It? New Insights into the Justifiability of Deceptive Crowdwork in Cyberspace

Abstract

Unlike classical forms of deception where the deceiver deceives their victims directly, the crowdsourcing of cyber deception provides a powerful and cost-effective mechanism for deceivers to create and spread falsehood from the shadows. But for a mass deception campaign to be effective, the crowdworkers must rationalize (and willingly accept) their role in the deceptive act. What, then, could justify participation in a mass-deception campaign? To answer this question, we adopt the qualitative vignette approach and utilize neutralization theory as our guiding lens. Our results point to several neutralization techniques that crowdworkers could invoke to convincingly rationalize involvement in a cyber deception campaign. Importantly, the findings shed new light on a growing pessimism about work ethics in cyberspace which may lead some ordinary people into joining deception campaigns, believing it to be the future of advertising. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these novel insights. Background: the evolution of deceptionDeception is not a novel concern, and scholars have studied this behavior from various fields, including

A Dataset of Coordinated Cryptocurrency-Related Social Media Campaigns

“…The practices and ethics of advertising, in general (Schauster, Ferrucci, and Neill 2016), and social media promotion (Zeng, Kohno, and Roesner 2021), in particular, have been debated by researchers. Related work has highlighted particularly questionable practices, such as astroturfing (i.e., hidden coordinated information campaigns that mimic genuine user behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online) for consumers (Kauppila and Soliman 2022;Lee, Tamilarasan, and Caverlee 2013) and citizens (Schoch et al 2022). Dutta and Chakraborty (2021) have studied blackmarket services that are employed by "collusive" users to inflate the popularity of their online account and get appraisals for their content, while spam has been a topic of intensive research over the years (e.g., Benevenuto et al 2010;Yardi et al 2009).…”

A Dataset of Coordinated Cryptocurrency-Related Social Media Campaigns

“…The practices and ethics of advertising, in general (Schauster, Ferrucci, and Neill 2016), and social media promotion (Zeng, Kohno, and Roesner 2021), in particular, have been debated by researchers. Related work has highlighted particularly questionable practices, such as astroturfing (i.e., hidden coordinated information campaigns that mimic genuine user behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online) for consumers (Kauppila and Soliman 2022;Lee, Tamilarasan, and Caverlee 2013) and citizens (Schoch et al 2022). Dutta and Chakraborty (2021) have studied blackmarket services that are employed by "collusive" users to inflate the popularity of their online account and get appraisals for their content, while spam has been a topic of intensive research over the years (e.g., Benevenuto et al 2010;Yardi et al 2009).…”