DHOW: Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web Workshop

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.