Special Session

FAKE NEWS, BOTS AND TROLLS

Fake news has become one of the main threats to our society. Although fake news is not a new phenomenon, the exponential growth of social media has offered an easy platform for its fast and wide propagation. The threat is even greater when fake news dissemination has a political or an ideological purpose, as it happens during electoral campaigns or during extreme events able to endanger political regimes, such as epidemics. Bots are commonly related to fake news spreading. They can artificially inflate the popularity of an opinion or a political candidate, as well as undermine the reputation of a targeted politician and hinder an opposing view, by repeatedly spamming contents produced by disinformation outlets. Other actors of misbehaviour in social media are trolls that offend people, dominate online discussions, and in general try to manipulate people's opinion by triggering hate and anger, with the aim of interfering with the regular public debate.

In this special session we would like the research community to share how the above problems need to be addressed from several interdisciplinary perspectives. Special emphasis will be on how news broadcasting corporations fact check claims by politicians, public figures, advocacy groups and institutions engaged in the public debate; how crowd signals in social media can be used to flag fake news; how online user activity fingerprints can be leveraged in order to detect a malicious use of social networks; how pieces of disinformation spread on social networks; how fake news broadcasters cooperate to conduct misinformation campaigns; how to design a semi-automated system that could trace and/or verify news shared online, helping journalists to identify disinformation.

Topics of interest

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Computational approaches to the following tasks:

• Detection of fake news spreaders

• Detection of bots and trolls

• Identification of information generated by bots and trolls

• Patterns in fake news propagation

• Credibility assessment of online information and information sources

• Detection of polarization in online communities

• Multimodal fake news detection

• Early detection of fake news

• Fake news prevention, filtering and containment

• Analysis/detection of multi-platform fake news spreading

Others:

• Measurements and analysis of fake news impact

• Resources for journalists for fake news detection

Keynotes

Submission

Papers for a special session should be submitted to the special session track instead of the main conference in the DSAA’2020 submission system.

Special session papers strictly follow the same specifications, requirements and policies as the main conference submissions in terms of the paper submission deadline, notification deadline, paper formatting and length, and important policies. The paper length allowed for the papers is a maximum of ten (10) pages. The format for the papers is the standard 2-column U.S. letter style IEEE Conference template.

You can find more info here. Guidelines about formatting Research and Application tracks papers apply also to Special Session papers.

Special issue

Top-quality papers accepted at the DSAA2020 conference will be selected for extension and invited to the special issues of the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics (JDSA, Springer) and some other journals DSAA2020 is working on.

Important Dates

Special Session Submission Deadline: 10 June 2020

Paper Acceptance Notification: 26 Jul 2020

Paper and poster camera ready: 09 Aug 2020

Organisers

• Barrón-Cedeño Alberto, DIT, Università di Bologna, Italy

• Giachanou Anastasia, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

• Koltsova Olessia, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

• Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

• Semeraro Alfonso, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy

• Xiuzhen Jenny Zhang, RMIT University, Australia

Programme committee

• Aiello Luca, Bells Labs, London, UK

• Capozzi Arthur, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy

• Carman Mark, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

• Ciampaglia Giovanni Luca, University of South Florida, US

• De Domenico Manlio, Bruno Kessler Foundation, Italy

• Ferres Leo, Universidad de Deserrollo, Santiago de Chile, Chile

• Ghanem Bilal, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

• Gil Hermenegildo, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

• Koltsov Sergei, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia

• Montes y Gómez Manuel, INAOE Puebla, Mexico

• Nakov Preslav, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar

• Panchenko Alexander, Skoltech University, Russia

• Paolotti Daniela, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy

• Ponzetto Simone Paolo, Univesität Mannheim, Germany

• Rangel Francisco, Symanto, Germany

• Rubin Victoria, University of Western Ontario, Canada

• Schifanella Rossano, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy

• Sidorov Grigori, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico

• Stratu Strelet Doina, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

• Tambuscio Marcella, Austraian Academy of Science, Austria

• Urbinati Alessandra, University of Turin, Italy

• Vilella Salvatore, University of Turin, Italy