Context. Online media have become a politically, economically, and organizationally critical infrastructure. Internet users all over the world can directly interact with each other and participate in for example political discussions. Through online media, journalists have access to enormous amounts of information and public sentiment that increasingly becomes part of their reporting. Politicians refine their positions and actions based on the (seemingly) public opinion, which they distill from online media. Others use these channels to distribute their views. Companies allow product reviews by users to provide crowd-based quality assurance.
Symposium topic. In an ideal world, participation and openness would foster free and democratic processes as well as beneficial societal interactions. However, beyond the desired space for free expression of public opinions, such openness also provides options for large-scaled and orchestrated manipulations. Groups of humans (“trolls”) or semi- to fully-automated systems (“social bots”) can bias or manipulate societal streams, perceptions, and multiplicators in society. How can we detect and learn from this phenomenon, and how do we combat fake news and misinformation?
MISDOOM is a multidisciplinary international symposium that brings together researchers and practitioners from communication science, media studies, computer science, data science, as well as journalists and online media professionals to discuss current topics, technical advances and societal challenges in the area of online media. Participants can discuss and contribute to the following (non-exclusive list of) topics:
(Text sourced from conference website)