First Call for Abstracts

Workshop on Bias, Disinformation, Misinformation, and
Propaganda in Online News and Social Media

Workshop website: https://propaganda.qcri.org/bias-
misinformation-workshop-socinfo19/

Date: November 18, 2019

Abstracts submission deadline: September 5, 2019 (23:59 PM
Pacific Standard Time)
Co-located with Social Informatics 2019, November 18-21, Doha,
Qatar.

In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of social media, which
have enabled people to virtually share information with a large
number of users with little-to-no regulation or quality control. On
the one hand, this has enabled anyone with a computer and
internet access to rapidly create and disseminate content. On the
other hand, it has also opened the door for malicious users,
including automated bots, to rapidly spread disinformation,
misinformation, and propaganda, which can now reach audiences
at an unprecedented scale. This has resulted in the proliferation
of false information that is typically created either (a) to attract
network traffic in order to secure financial gain through
advertising revenue (e.g. clickbait), or (b) to affect individual
people beliefs - something that can ultimately lead to influencing
major events such as political elections or views on public health.
There are strong indications that false information was
weaponized at an unprecedented scale during the 2016 U.S. and
the 2018 Brazilian presidential campaigns, among many others.
The workshop aims to bring together researchers from both
academia and industry to discuss bias, disinformation,
misinformation, and propaganda in online news and in social
media.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

- Bias
- Bots
- Check-worthiness
- Claim extraction
- Claim source detection
- Clickbait
- Deep fakes
- Disinformation
- Echo chambers
- Fact-checking
- Fake reviews
- Harassment/bullying
- Hate speech
- Hyper-partisanship
- Misinformation
- Offensive language
- Polarization
- Propaganda identification/analysis
- Seminar users
- Source reliability
- Stance detection
- Supporting evidence retrieval
- Trolls
- Trust
- Truth


Submission Format

We kindly ask you to submit abstracts addressing one of the
topics above from the perspective of use cases, tools, resources,
and preliminary experimental results.
Abstracts should be in Socinfo format (see
https://www.springer.com/gb/computer-science/lncs/conference-
proceedings-guidelines), 1-2 pages long. Abstracts will be
reviewed by the workshop organizers and the authors of selected
abstracts will be assigned a time slot for a short presentation (15
minutes each) to present their ideas. Selected abstracts will be
made available on this website.
Send your submission to socinfo-bias-
workshop@googlegroups.com.

Workshop Organisers:

Giovanni da San Martino (Qatar Computing Research Institute,
HBKU)
Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU)
Alberto Barrón-Cedeño (Università di Bologna)
Jisun An (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU)
Haewoon Kwak (Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU)
Banu Akdenizli (Northwestern University, Qatar)
Marc O. Jones (Hamad Bin Khalifa University)
Grant Franklin Totten (Aljazeera)