Debunking misinformation and disinformation calls for interdisciplinary collaboration of and advancements in multiple areas, including journalism, communication studies, law and public policy, psychology, and political science. Computing technology plays a crucial role in it. The last few years have witnessed a substantial growth in efforts at computational fact-checking, of which many are data-driven, AI-powered, and include human in the loop. These efforts tackle various fronts, such as the detection of fabricated news, rumors, and spam on social media, automation in fact-checking, flagging clickbait articles, and discovering fake accounts and malicious social media bots.
Advancements in algorithms and AI have raised significant ethics concerns regarding fairness, transparency, trust, and misuse. The concerns are particularly pertinent to fact-checking---while fact-checkers discern truth from falsehood, who is there to check them? Furthermore, the harm of misuse of AI is already manifested in this arena. For instance, creators of falsehoods may optimize for their objectives using approaches steered by algorithms. Finally, maintaining a high bar of ethics in research itself, particularly ensuring the reproducibility of research results, is vital to the health of the enterprise.
The success of tackling misinformation lies not only in methodology and technology but also education. To help cultivate a society that is more robust to falsehoods, to break “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers”, we must raise the awareness of all aspects about misinformation and we must train a generation of Web users that are well versed in media literacy, data literacy, and logic and fallacy.
The proceedings of the workshop will be published jointly with The Web Conference 2019 proceedings. Papers must be submitted in PDF according to the ACM format published in the ACM guidelines (www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template), selecting the generic “sigconf” sample. The PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded. Workshop papers must be self-contained and in English. Papers submitted cannot exceed six pages in length, including references and appendix. Submissions are handled through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=misinfoworkshop2019
Paper submission deadline: Friday, Feb 8, 2019
Notification of acceptance: Monday, February 25, 2019
Camera-ready deadline: Sunday, March 3, 2019
Workshop date: Tuesday, May 14, 2019, San Francisco, CA - Co-located with TheWebConf 2019
We are discussing with journals regarding a special issue on the workshop. More details will be released here once available.