[CFP] DHOW @ ACMMM 2025 - The 2nd Workshop on Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web

[Amit Kumar Jaiswal]

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2nd Workshop on Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web (DHOW) at The 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia. Dublin, Ireland. Oct 27-31, 2025

Dublin, Ireland, October 27/28, 2025
https://dhow-workshop.github.io

Paper Submission Deadline: July 11th, 2025 
Paper Notification: August 1st, 2025

Workshop Scope and Aim
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 2025.

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.

Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to):

• Studying different types of harmful content
  
• Computational fact-checking & Misinformation Detection
  
• Role of Generative AI in Mitigating Harmful Content
  
• Harassment, Bullying, and Hate Speech Detection
  
• Explainable AI for Harmful Content Analysis
  
• Multimodal and Multilingual Harmful Content Detection, such as fake news, spam, and troll detection.
• Deepfake and Synthetic Media
  
• Ethical & Societal Implications of AI in Content Moderation
  
• Both Qualitative and Quantitative studies on harmful content
  
• Psychological effects of harmful content, like mental health
  
• Approaches for data collection or data annotation using multimodal large models on harmful content
• User study on the effects of harmful content on human beings

Submission Modalities and Important Dates:

• Submission deadline: July 11, 2025 (extended)
• Notification of acceptance: August 01, 2025
• Camera-ready papers due: August 11, 2025
• Workshop date: October 27/28, 2025
  

Submission Guidelines:

• Submission Instructions: https://dhow-workshop.github.io/2025/#call
  
• Submission Link: https://openreview.net/group?id=acmmm.org/ACMMM/2025/Workshop/DHOW
  

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 (Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India)
• Durgesh Nandini (University of Bayreuth, Germany)

Note: The workshop will be conducted in a hybrid format to ensure maximum participation. Accommodating attendees both online and in person. 

Feel free to forward this invitation to colleagues and collaborators who may be interested.

Best regards,
DHOW Organizers – ACMMM 2025