Report on the 1st Workshop on Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web (DHOW) at WebSci 2024

Gautam Kishore Shahi, Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Durgesh Nandini, Luis-Daniel Ibáñez, Thomas Mandl, Haiming Liu

Abstract: With the advancement of digital technologies and gadgets, online content has become easily accessible by users. At the same time, harmful content also spread widely. There are different harmful content types present on various platforms in multiple languages. The topic of harmful content is broad and covers multiple research directions. In research, the different forms are mostly analyzed separately, e.g., misinformation, cyberbullying, and hate speech. Most research has been conducted for a specific platform, monolingual situation, or particular topics. Counter-measures like blocking or down-ranking can make harmful content spreaders switch platforms and languages to continuously reach a user base. Harmful content does not only appear on social media but also on news media. Spreaders share harmful content in posts, news articles, comments, and hyperlinks. There is a great need to study harmful content across platforms, languages, and topics. We plan to bring the research on harmful content under one umbrella so that different approaches and novel methods can be shared. We organized the 1st workshop on DHOW: Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web at WebSci 2024, which brings together research on different topics related to harmful content. We expect to discuss innovative research work and future research directions.