[CFP] 2st International Workshop on Socio-Technical Approaches to Content Moderation and Platform Governance (COMPASS) @CSCW 2026

[Lorenzo Cima]

* apologies if you receive multiple copies of this cfp *


COMPASS 2026
The 2nd International Workshop on Socio-Technical Approaches to Content Moderation and Platform Governance
https://sites.google.com/view/workshop-compass26
October 10, 2026
Salt Lake City, Utah (USA)
Co-located with ACM CSCW 2026: https://cscw.acm.org/2026/


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ABOUT
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Content moderation is one of the central socio-technical challenges of contemporary online platforms. Social media, online communities, livestreaming services, generative AI systems, and other digital infrastructures shape how people communicate, participate in public discourse, and engage in collective and economic activities. At the same time, these environments must address a wide range of harms, including misinformation, hate speech, harassment, exploitative content, and coordinated manipulation, alongside evolving legal and regulatory requirements concerning transparency, accountability, and user protection. Rather than being limited to automated detection, content moderation involves complex socio-technical work: defining and interpreting community guidelines, designing and evaluating interventions, supporting moderators and affected users, and balancing competing values such as safety, expression, and fairness across diverse cultural and institutional contexts. Moderation also operates across multiple levels, from individual experiences to community dynamics and platform governance.
Despite the growing importance of content moderation, work in this area is still spread across different communities. Technical research often focuses on automated detection and machine learning, while legal, policy, HCI, and social science perspectives are developed in parallel. This separation makes it harder to connect insights across methods and levels of analysis. COMPASS aims to address this gap by bringing together computational, human-centered, organizational, and governance perspectives on moderation as a socio-technical challenge.

COMPASS is designed as a highly interactive workshop emphasizing discussion, exchange, and collaboration. We particularly encourage submissions that bridge methodological and disciplinary boundaries, including empirical, computational, qualitative, theoretical, design-oriented, legal, and mixed-methods approaches. By fostering sustained dialogue across research communities, COMPASS seeks to advance more holistic, human-centered, and societally grounded approaches to online safety, moderation, and platform governance.

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TOPICS
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Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

•    Community guidelines and governance
•    Moderation interventions and downstream effects
•    Metrics and evaluation
•    Human-centred moderation
•    Cross-cultural and social dimensions of moderation
•    Legal and regulatory implications
•    Ethics and values
•    Data and transparency
•    Decentralized and participatory moderation
•    Emerging technologies
•    Moderation challenges involving vulnerable or high-profile populations

Please, refer to the workshop website for the detailed topic description.

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SUBMISSION
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Contributions will be reviewed by up to three members of the Program Committee. ACM CSCW does not publish workshop proceedings, and thus all accepted papers at COMPASS’26 will be non-archival.

We welcome the following types of submissions:

•    Research papers (up to 10 pages including references, but excluding appendices) presenting full-fledged, mature scientific work. This can either be novel or already submitted/published at another venue.
•    Resource papers (up to 10 pages including references, but excluding appendices) presenting datasets, applications, softwares, or demos. These can either be novel or already submitted/published at another venue.
•    Work-in-progress papers (up to 5 pages including references, but excluding appendices) presenting preliminary results.
•    Vision and position papers (up to 5 pages including references and appendices) presenting new ideas.

Papers should be submitted as a single PDF file via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=compass2026
Detailed information on submission and evaluation procedures are available on the workshop web page.

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DATES
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•    Submission deadline: July 10, 2026
•    Notification: July 31, 2026
•    Workshop: October 10, 2026
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ORGANIZERS
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•    Stefano Cresci, IIT-CNR, Italy
•    Savvas Zannettou, TU Delft, Netherlands
•    Catalina Goanta, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
•    Shagun Jhaver, Rutgers University, USA
•    Robyn Caplan, Duke University, USA
•    Sanjay Kairam, OpenAI, USA
•    Koustuv Saha, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
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CONTACT
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All inquiries should be sent to stefano...@iit.cnr.it