Call for Papers

The pervasiveness of digital platforms and social media makes them a battleground for bad actors to fabricate and propagate massive amounts of harmful information, such as hate speech, discrimination, violent extremism, child sexual abuse, disinformation and misinformation, with massive online engagement. There is an urgent need for broad collaborations among various stakeholders, including academia researchers from  multi-disciplines, technologists, law and policy makers, non-profit organizations, private sectors, and end users. 

The 4th IEEE Digital Platforms and Societal Harms (2024 DPSH) will take place from Oct.14 – 15, 2024 at American University, Washington DC, USA. Accepted full papers may be presented in person or online. This conference aims to provide a venue to facilitate discussions among various stakeholders from relevant but diverse disciplines. Interdisciplinary studies are especially welcomed. Interesting topics include but are not limited to:

  • Law and public policy, such as Approaches to harm minimisation; Trade offs between competing legal and policy incentives; Global trends in government responses & intervention to social harms;  Human behavior and emotional regulation; Public-private cooperation to address social harms.

  • Tech/private sector policy and governance, such as Development of corporate policies and safety by design; Responsible tech governance, management and oversight; Corporate governance structure design; Protection, ranging from whistleblower protection to protection of designs as project progress; Balance competing policy incentives (free speech and harm minimisation); Transparency. 

  • Information aspects, such as Definitions of information trustworthiness, authenticity, integrity and credibility; Information quality and content moderation; Boundaries of journalistic behavior online; Suitability of news content from journalistic entities to surface ground truth. 

  • User aspects and psychological features, such as Definitions and analysis of online authentic behavior; Human behavior analysis; Cognitive tagging; Trust mechanisms; Moral foundations & ethical frameworks; Evolutionary features of online hate speech and disinformation; Hatred basis against various religious and ethnic groups; Human performance against DeepFake media; User views on government or corporate approaches to mitigating harms; User reporting mechanisms design; User safety.

  • AI and digital harms, such as Ethical, Explainable and Sustainable AI; Algorithmic bias and discrimination; New datasets and evaluation methodologies; New approaches for ground truth labeling; DeepFake media generation or detection; AI chatbots as information assistant or opinion influencer; Open-source toolkits, Serverless AI Applications.

  • Media propagation aspects, such as Propagation mechanism; Propagation and authenticity; Conspiracies, disinformation and propaganda; Regional and local media; Media fragmentation and changing patterns of media consumption and usage; Risks and opportunities of new media usage; Media representation, inequalities, and minorities; Media and information warfare.          

In addition to those engaged in research, we welcome the participation of practitioners from industry, civil society, and government. To facilitate this participation we also invite presentations on tools, services, projects, initatives, and department / organisational reports related to hate speech, discrimination, violent extremism, child sexual abuse, disinformation and misinformation. To present (in-person or online), an abstract must be provided and will be checked by the program committee for relevance. These presentations will not include a publication. Abstracts may also be used by researchers to present work in progress, or to present previously published work that remains relevant and timely. 

Timeline for paper submission have been extended to:

  • Full paper submission: June 26, 2024
  • Abstract submission (for presentations without a full paper): July 31, 2024
  • Acceptance notification: August 19, 2024
  • Camera Ready Manuscript: September 15, 2024
Download the Call for Papers

Instructions for authors

For full papers

Accepted full papers presented by an original author or co-author during the conference will be published in the 2024 IEEE Digital Platforms and Societal Harms Conference Proceedings, and submitted for publication in IEEE Xplore®.  

We encourage you to use the “submit your paper” button below to enter your authors, paper title, and abstract as a first step. You can then attach the paper  at a later point (before the deadline) when you are ready.  

Paper Templates: Please use the IEEE Conference Templates to format your paper: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html 

Length: Minimum of 5 pages and a maximum of 8 pages, using the template above.

PDF Generations: Please use PDF eXpress to generate / check your PDF before submission. 

  1.  Select the “New Users – Click Here” link.
  2. Enter the following:
    • 60098X for the Conference ID
    • Your email address
    • A password
  3. Continue to enter information as prompted.

An Online confirmation will be  displayed and an email confirmation will be sent verifying your account setup.

For abstract only talks 

Use the “submit your paper” link below and select a track that is most relevant and includes the word “abstract” in its title. Your abstract shoudl give a good idea of what the talk will be about. We encourage abstracts of around 500 words, but short abstracts can be used if they are clear, and abstracts of up to 1,000 words are possible. There are no formatting requirements or templates for these abstracts, the text can be entered directly in the form.  

Submit your paper

Copyright Transfer:

  • Copyright transfer to IEEE will be completed as part of the final submission of accepted papers to the EDAS system. We are using the EDAS IEEE eCopyright function (ECF). With ECF, authors are redirected to an IEEE web site and fill in the IEEE copyright form there. The ECF then reports completion of the web form to EDAS, allowing the author to upload the form. Thus, authors do not have to print, fill out and upload copyright forms manually. 
  • If you are an author that requires using a third-party agreement based on your employment or funding, please email [email protected] supplying the paper title, conference name (2024 IEEE Digital Platforms and Societal Harms), the EDAS paper ID, and a copy of the signed agreement.
  • Authors are free to post the accepted version of their articles on their personal Web sites or those of their employers, as per the IEEE’s author posting policy found in Section 8.1.9 of the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual. 
  • Details regarding IEEE copyright can be found here. See ieee.org/copyright for full references.

See the highlights video from last year

(Opens in a new window at IEEE.TV)