Program

Workshop Registration

https://www2019.thewebconf.org/registration

Keynotes

Alex Leavitt, Facebook

Misinformation is Half the Battle

Abstract: In the past three years, social media platforms have rapidly deployed a number of research initiatives and product interventions to address misinformation and related media ecosystem issues. This talk will cover some of the sociological, technological, legal, and philosophical difficulties that need to be overcome across all platforms with implementing solutions to misinformation. It first draws on the core challenges of definitions and technical identification/accuracy and then extends these challenges into areas of understanding international media ecosystem contexts, signal and control usability, systems of expertise and governance, policy implications, and global programs. Alex Leavitt, a senior UX Researcher at Facebook, will cover a number of his collaborative research and product development projects related to misinformation and information quality and conclude with key and pressing research questions for academic and industry researchers in the coming years.

Bio: Alex Leavitt is a senior Quantitative UX Researcher at Facebook. On the Civic Integrity product and research team, Alex uses a range of mixed methods (from survey experiments, machine learning, and social network analysis to traditional ethnographic interviews and observation) to study the impact of social ties and algorithms on people’s exposure to and engagement with politics, news, misinformation, polarization, incivility, and violence. His research is published at venues such as the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Social Media + Society. He received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, and he has also been a researcher at Sony PlayStation, Disney Interactive, Microsoft Research New England and MIT.

Miriam Metzger, UC Santa Barbara

Looking Backward to See a Way Forward: How Credibility Research in Social Science Can Help in the Battle Against Misinformation

Abstract: Credibility research in the social sciences has a long history that may be particularly informative to today’s efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation online. This keynote address will discuss the ways in which credibility has been studied in the disciplines of communication and psychology, including both how this notion has been conceptually and operationally defined. Key research findings will be presented with the aim of understanding what kinds of computational algorithms, tools, systems, and applications for tackling misinformation and disinformation are more versus less likely to be effective. This will help to answer a very important yet often overlooked question, which is: To what extent is misinformation a problem of information or a problem of human information processing? The answer to this question is crucial for both software developers and designers of educational intervention efforts to minimize the negative societal impacts of fabricated news and information flowing over the Internet and on social media.

Bio: MIRIAM J. METZGER is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research lies at the intersection of media, information technology, and trust, centering on how information and communication technologies alter our understandings of credibility and force us to confront new challenges in protecting our privacy. She has also published work examining the theoretical and regulatory changes brought about by emerging information and communication technologies. Her work has been published widely in the field of communication, as well as in information and computer science, and she has co-edited two volumes investigating issues of digital literacy. Outside her home department, Dr. Metzger serves as the Education Director of the Center for Information, Technology and Society (CITS-UCSB), where she is also a faculty affiliate. From 2011-2016 she was the Associate Director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Society (CNS-UCSB), the only NSF-designated National Center to focus on social science research.

Panel

Roadmap for Building a Credible Web

  • Panelists: Bill Adair (Duke University), Srijan Kumar (Stanford University), Alex Leavitt (Facebook), Alexios Mantzarlis (TED), Miriam Metzger (UC Santa Barbara)

Accepted Papers

  • Examining the Roles of Automation, Crowds and Professionals Towards Sustainable Fact-checking

Naeemul Hassan (University of Mississippi), Mohammad Yousuf (University of Oklahoma), Md Mahfuzul Haque (University of Mississippi), Javier A. Suarez Rivas (University of Mississippi), Md Khadimul Islam (The University of Mississippi)

  • Red Bots Do It Better: Comparative Analysis of Social Bot Partisan Behavior

Luca Luceri (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, and University of Bern), Ashok Deb (University of Southern California), Adam Badawy (University of Southern California), Emilio Ferrara (University of Southern California)

  • Neural Check-Worthiness Ranking with Weak Supervision: Finding Sentences for Fact-Checking

Casper Hansen (University of Copenhagen), Christian Hansen (University of Copenhagen), Stephen Alstrup (University of Copenhagen), Jakob Grue Simonsen (University of Copenhagen), Christina Lioma (University of Copenhagen)

  • A Linked Data Model for Facts, Statements and Beliefs

Ludivine Duroyon (France Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA), François Goasdoué (France Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA), Ioana Manolescu (France Inria and LIX (UMR 7161, CNRS and Ecole Polytechnique))

  • A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential Elections

Caio Machado (University of Oxford), Beatriz Kira (University of São Paulo), Vidya Narayanan (University of Oxford), Bence Kollanyi (University of Oxford), Philip Howard (University of Oxford)

  • A Topic-Agnostic Approach to Identify Fake News Pages

Sonia Castelo Quispe (New York University), Thais Almeida (Federal University of Amazonas), Anas Elghafari (New York University), Aécio Santos (New York University), Kien Pham (New York University), Eduardo Nakamura (Federal University of Amazonas), Juliana Freire (New York University)

  • Institutional Counter-disinformation Strategies in a Networked Democracy

Jonathan Stray (Columbia University)

  • Differences in Health News from Reliable and Unreliable Media

Sameer Dhoju (The University of Mississippi), Md Main Uddin Rony (The University of Mississippi), Muhammad Ashad Kabir (Charles Sturt University), Naeemul Hassan (The University of Mississippi)

  • Misinfosec: Applying Information Security Paradigms to Misinformation Campaigns

Christopher R. Walker (Marvelous AI, San Francisco, CA), Sara-Jayne Terp (SOFWERX, Tampa, FL), Pablo C. Breuer (U.S. Special Operations Command), Courtney Crooks (Georgia Tech Research Institute)

Invited Posters (all accepted papers + the following)

  • When Algorithms Assign Fact-Checks to Online Stories and News Publishers: A Sociotechnical Perspective

Emma Lurie (Wellesley College), Eni Mustafaraj (Wellesley College)

  • Online Misinformation: From the Deceiver to the Victim

Francesca Spezzano (Boise State University), Anu Shrestha (Boise State University)

  • Building Consequential Rankings

Behzad Tabibianf (MPI-IS & MPI-SWS), Vicenç Gomez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Abir De (MPI-SWS), Bernhard Schölkopf (MPI-IS), Manuel Gomez Rodriguez (MPI-SWS)

  • More ...