DHOW: Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web

With the advancement of digital technologies and gadgets, online content has become easily accessible. At the same time, harmful content also spread widely. There are different harmful content types present on various platforms in multiple languages. The topic of harmful content is broad and covers multiple research directions. Users of platforms are affected by all of them. In research, the different forms are mostly analysed separately, e.g. misinformation, cyber-bullying and hate speech. Most research has been conducted for only one platform, for a monolingual situation or on a particular issue. Counter-measures like blocking are down-ranking can make harmful content spreaders to switch platforms and languages to continuously reach a user base. Harmful content does not only appear on social media but also on news media. Spreader share harmful content in posts, news articles, comments and hyperlinks. There is a great need to study harmful content across platforms, languages, and topics.

We plan to bring the research on harmful content under one umbrella such that different approaches and novel methods can be shared. The workshop will also cover the currently ongoing issues of war and elections. The theme of the DHOW workshop is centered around the development of robust methods and approaches for mitigation of misinformation in AI generated multimodal contents, and so brings together the research on different topics of harmful content. 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.