The 1st 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: extended to *March 22 2024 AOE*

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

*Co-located with WebSci 2024* https://websci24.org/ https://lrec-coling-2024.org/ Stuttgart, Germany, 21-24 May 2024

*Important Dates* Submission deadline: extended to *March 22, 2024* Notification of acceptance: April 12, 2024 Camera-ready papers due: April 22, 2024 Workshop date: May 21, 2024

*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 2024.

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*

- Analysis of different types of harmful content(fake news, misinformation, hate speech) - Computational fact-checking - Role of Generative AI in Mitigating Harmful Content - Identifying harassment/bullying/hate speech, and misinformation/disinformation - Role of Explainable AI in Studying Harmful Content - Multi-modal harmful content (fake news, misinformation, hate speech) - Deepfake and its influence - Multi-lingual harmful content like Hate speech, Fake News, Bot, spam, troll detection

*Submissions* - Submission Instructions: https://dhow-workshop.github.io/#call - Submission Link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dhow2024

* 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 ) - Luis-Daniel Ibáñez (University of Southampton, United Kingdom) - Durgesh Nandini (University of Bayreuth, Germany)

Organisers, DHOW 2024 Web: DHOW https://websci24.org/workshops-and-tutorials/