A two-day hybrid conference with sessions focused on different aspects of Harmful Online Communication and talks from leading experts. The main event will take place in Cologne, Germany, with the option of online participation.

Harmful Online Communication refers to a variety of ongoing activities on communication platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and many more. Independent of the platform, harm can, for example, occur in the form of hate speech towards different groups, including racist or sexist content. Harmful online communication can also include aspects of mis- and disinformation, or threats of physical violence. Depending on the type of content, different strategies may be needed to detect it and to apply appropriate counter measures.

The aim of this conference is to bring together a group of experts in computer-based detection and analysis of harmful online communication to discuss new developments in the field. The focus will lie on theoretical concept definitions, data quality, and comparative measurement tools. This will benefit the field of harmful online communication studies by building a community around validity and reliability and creating a baseline that can inform the building of comparative research and shared knowledge. The output of the conference will inform the future work in Computational Social Sciences and help more traditional social scientists to improve their use of data from online platforms.

Open questions to be discussed include, but are not limited to: What are the practical challenges in handling harmful online communication?  ···  Which theoretical concepts and tools can be used to detect and analyze harmful online communication?  ··· What are the academic challenges in detecting and analyzing harmful online communication? ··· Which data quality measures should be employed?  ··· Which legal and ethical challenges does the field face (e.g. privacy/informed consent)?  ··· How can the challenges of detecting and analyzing harmful online communication be overcome?  ··· How can we improve the use of data from online platforms in the future?

The conference is funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Invited speakers

Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen
Leon Derczynski, ITU Copenhagen & University of Washington
Iginio Gagliardone, University of the Witwatersrand
Elena Jung, modus | zad, Centre for Applied Research on Deradicalisation
Libby Hemphill, University of Michigan
Homa Hosseinmardi, University of Pennsylvania
Paloma Viejo Otero, Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen
Tetsuro Kobayashi, Waseda University
Anne Lauscher, University of Hamburg
Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Max-Planck-Institute Berlin
Ilia Markov, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Diana Rieger, Ludwig-Maximilians-University München
Björn Ross, University of Edinburgh
Paul Röttger, Bocconi University
Mattia Samory, Sapienza University of Rome
Francielle Vargas, University of São Paulo
Isabelle van der Vegt, Utrecht University