Fake news, conspiracies, manipulated media, selective reporting, facts derided as lies: citizens of democracies encounter wildly conflicting information about the supposedly factual world. Think of Pizzagate, a well-known and extensively discredited conspiracy theory about an abuse circle run by high-ranking Democratic Party officials. Or of the recent 2020 United States presidential election, where most Republican voters said they believed that Trump won and the official results were fraudulent. COVID-19 has produced its own myriad of false beliefs, for example that the virus was engineered in China. Even outright denials of the pandemic or other complex phenomena such as climate change are not uncommon. The borders between fact and opinion are blurring, and the prospects of deliberative democracy and collective action become increasingly bleak.

Of course, truth has always been precarious - neither misinformation nor widespread false beliefs are unique to our time. But the web and social media technologies have distinctly rearranged the struggles over truth and falsehood. Through its unfiltered publication process, breakneck pace, and obsession with engagement (rather than accuracy), the modern web has created not only decentralized modes of expression but also novel vectors for misinformation and disinformation. We therefore need new tools, concepts and technologies to ensure the integrity of information ecosystems. This workshop aims to bring together leaders across industry and academia to discuss what tools for measurement and mitigation could look like.

(Image by R KIKUO JOHNSON)

Submissions

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit extended abstracts or short papers. Submissions are 2 to 4 pages in length, plus unlimited pages of references. Authors can choose to make their submissionarchival or non-archival. We invite submissions including (but not limited to):

1. works-in-progress
2. research or research proposals
3. provocations or critical approaches

Submissions are 2-4 page PDF's submitted via Easy Chair and should follow the AAAI format. Authors may include an appendix but submissions should be self-contained as reviewers are not asked to review appendices. Review will be blind and submissions should be reasonably anonymized. Accepted submissions will have the option of publishing their work in the proceedings of ICWSM 2021. For any questions, email zive@mit.edu

Topics

Topics that submissions might address include, but are not limited to:

1. Contextualizing false beliefs and information issues
   • 📚Historical context and meta-reviews of studies
   • 🔮Fundamental questions of truth, inquiry, and epistemology online
   • ⚖️Considerations of accessibility, disability and marginalization
2. Measuring credibility and beliefs impact on the online ecosystem
   • 📊Metrics, and methods to quantify credibility and false belief
   • 🧑‍💻Research on human experiences with information credibility systems and issues
   • 🗒Data sets that surface credibility issues and false beliefs online
3. Mitigating misinformation and supporting credibility
   • 🎛Systems that build information credibility or reduce the spread of false beliefs
   • ⚒Challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration between research and practice
   • 🔭Speculative design, value-sensitive design, and critical design approaches.

We encourage submissions from across the political spectrum and welcome work treating information credibility from multiple perspectives.

Workshop papers submission: March 27, 2021 April 10, 2021
Workshop paper acceptance notification: April 21, 2021
Workshop final camera-ready paper due: May 1, 2021
Workshop will take place June 7, 2021

1	Time (EST)	Section	Activity	Title	Presenters / Authors
2	2:00 PM	Introductions			Maurice Jakesch, Manon Ravel, Ziv Epstein
3	2:30 PM	1. Understand	Keynote 1	News from The Election Integrity Partnership	Renee DiResta
4	3:00 PM		Papers 1	Disambiguating Disinformation: Extending Beyond the Veracity of Online Content	Keeley Erhardt and Alex Pentland
5	3:10 PM			The Firestarting Troll, and Designing for Abusability	Andrew Beers, Sarah Nguyen, Maya Sioson, Mariam Mayanja, Monica Ionescu, Emma Spiro and Kate Starbird
6	3:20 PM			A Contextual Inquiry of The International Fact-Checking Network and Factuality on Social Media	Tarunima Prabhakar and Anushree Gupta
7	3:30 PM	Break
8	3:40 PM	2. Measure	Keynote 2	Understanding and Reducing Misinformation Online	David Rand
9	4:10 PM		Papers 2	Fooled Twice – People Cannot Detect Deepfakes But Think They Can	Nils Köbis, Soraperra Ivan and Barbora Dolezalova
10	4:20 PM			Responsible algorithmic filtering on social media and its cost	Sarah Cen and Devavrat Shah
11	4:30 PM			A Content-based Approach for the Analysis and Classification of Vaccine-related Stances on Twitter: the Italian Scenario	Marco Di Giovanni, Lorenzo Corti, Silvio Pavanetto, Francesco Pierri, Andrea Tocchetti and Marco Brambilla
12	4:40 PM	Break
13	4:50 PM	3. Mitigate	Papers 3	Introducing Credibility Signals and Citations to YouTube	Emelia Hughes, Renee Wang, Prerna Juneja, Tanushree Mitra and Amy Zhang
14	5:00 PM			Towards a Unified Framework for the Design & Development of Digital News Credibility Tools	James Stomber, Dilrukshi Gamage, Bill Skeet, and Amy X. Zhang
15	5:10 PM			The News Evaluator's Self-Assessment Tool: Training Adolescents in Civic Online Reasoning	Thomas Nygren and Carl-Anton Werner Axelsson
16	5:20 PM		Group activity		Maurice Jakesch, Manon Ravel, Ziv Epstein
17	5:50 PM	Wrapping up			Maurice Jakesch, Manon Ravel, Ziv Epstein