Cues to Deception in Islamic Websites Text and Design

Abstract

Deception is not always a lie, but sometimes a factual truth deliberately misleads. The deception continues to grow with the proliferation of the growth of the internet and reliance on internet information to make decisions. Thus, the absence of a deception judgment for websites will make users believe false and deceiving information which poses a serious problem, and there is still little scholarly work on this issue. Hence, the purpose is to investigate the distribution of cues to deception in real websites. A case study approach was carried out using content analysis. The cues were tested against some websites, and the context for the case study is the Prophet Muhammad’s biography. As a result, a list of cues was generated and grouped into nine heuristics; five heuristics related to text, and four heuristics related to design. Under each of these developed heuristics are lists of cues. The analysis from the case study confirmed the existence of the cues and enriched and improved the heuristics with more new cues