The 2st Workshop on DHOW: Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web Workshop

The workshop will be conducted in a *hybrid* format to ensure maximum participation, accommodating attendees both *online* and in person.

Submission deadline: *July 11 2025 AOE*

*Workshop site*: https://dhow-workshop.github.io/2025/

*Co-located with ACMMM 2025*

https://acmmm2025.org/ https://lrec-coling-2024.org/

Dublin, Ireland, 27-31 October 2024

*Important Dates*

Submission deadline: extended to *July 11, 2025*

Notification of acceptance: August 01, 2025

Camera-ready papers due: August 11, 2025

Workshop date: October 27/28, 2025

*Workshop Description*

With the advancement of digital technologies and gadgets, online content is easily accessible. At the same time, harmful content also gets spread. There are different harmful content available on different platforms in multiple languages. The topic of harmful content is broad and covers multiple research directions. But from the user’s aspect, they are affected by them all. Often, it is studied individually, like misinformation and hate speech. Research has been done on one platform, monolingual, on a particular issue. It leads to harmful content spreaders switching platforms and languages to reach the user base. Harmful is not limited to social media but also news media. Spreader shares harmful content in posts, news articles, comments, and hyperlinks. So, there is a need to study the harmful content by combining cross-platform, language, multimodal data and topics.

We will bring the research on harmful content under one umbrella so that research on different topics (hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, self-harm, offensive content, etc.) can bring some novel methods and recommendations for users, leveraging text analysis with image, audio, and video recognition to detect harmful content in diverse formats. The workshop will cover the ongoing issue of war or elections in 2025.

We believe this workshop will provide a unique opportunity for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, share latest developments, and collaborate on addressing the challenges associated with harmful contents spread across the Web. We expect that the workshop will generate insights and discussions that will help advance the field of societal artificial intelligence (AI) for the development of safer internet. In addition to attracting high quality research contributions to the workshop, one of the aims of the workshop is to mobilise the researchers working on the related areas to form a community.

*Submissions Topics*

•Studying different types of harmful content

•Computational fact-checking & Misinformation Detection

•Role of Generative AI in Mitigating Harmful Content

•Harassment, Bullying, and Hate Speech Detection

•Explainable AI for Harmful Content Analysis

•Multimodal and Multilingual Harmful Content Detection such as fake news, spam, and troll detection.

•Deepfake and Synthetic Media

•Ethical & Societal Implications of AI in Content Moderation

•Both Qualitative and Quantitative study on harmful content

•Psychological effects of harmful content like mental health

•Approaches for data collection or data annotation using multimodal large models on harmful content

•User study on the effects of harmful content on human beings

*Submissions*

- Submission Instructions: https://dhow-workshop.github.io/2025/#call https://dhow-workshop.github.io/2025/#call

- Submission Link: https://openreview.net/group?id=acmmm.org/ACMMM/2025/Workshop/DHOW https://openreview.net/group?id=acmmm.org/ACMMM/2025/Workshop/DHOW

***Workshop organizers*

•Thomas Mandl (University of Hildesheim, Germany)

•Haiming Liu (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)

•Gautam Kishore Shahi(University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

•Amit Kumar Jaiswal (University of Surrey, United Kingdom )

•Durgesh Nandini (University of Bayreuth, Germany)

DHOW 2025