CFP for the DHOW: Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web Workshop

[Gautam Kishore Shahi]

Hello,

I am writing to inform you that the CFP for the DHOW: Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web Workshop

Submission deadline: March 15, 2026 AOE

Workshop website: https://dhow-workshop.github.io/2026/2

Co-located with WebSci 2026

Braunschweig, Germany, May 26-29, 2026

Workshop Description

With the advancement of digital technologies and gadgets, online content is easily accessible. At the same time, harmful content also spreads. 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 perspective, 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 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 the latest developments, and collaborate on addressing the challenges associated with harmful content 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 a 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 on different types harmful content 

• 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

• Deepfake and its influence 

• Multi-lingual harmful content like Hate speech, Fake News Bot, spam, and troll detection 

• Both Qualitative and Quantitative study on harmful content Psychological effects of harmful content like mental health 

• Approaches for data collection or data annotation using LLM on harmful content 

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

• Human-AI Collaboration and Defenses

Submissions

- Submission Instructions:  https://dhow-workshop.github.io/2026/2

- Submission Link: https://openreview.net/group?id=acmmm.org/WebSci/2026/Workshop/DHOW

Important Dates

Submission deadline: extended to March 15, 2026

Notification of acceptance: March 29, 2026

Camera-ready papers due: April 2, 2026

Workshop date: May 26-29, 2026

Workshop organizers

• Thomas Mandl, University of Hildesheim, Germany 

• Haiming Liu, University of Southampton, UK 

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

• Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India 

• Durgesh Nandini, University of Bayreuth, Germany 

• Luis-Daniel Ibáñez, University of Southampton, UK 

Organisers,

DHOW 2026