May 14, 2025
News Program

ICWSM 2025 Keynote Speaker

We are pleased to announce our first keynote speaker. This years Adamic-Glance Plenary Talk will be given by Kiran Garimella.

May 7, 2025
News Program

ICWSM 2025 Program

The ICWSM 2025 program has been released! Check the Schedule page. The program is subject to change.

May 5, 2025
News Program

Updated list of accepted paper

The list of accepted papers has been updated! Check the Accepted contributions page for more information.

April 23, 2025
News Deadline

Deadlines for ICWSM 2026

The deadlines for ICWSM 2026 have been added! Check the Submit page for more information.

March 18, 2025
News Deadline

Deadline Change: Student Travel Grant Applications Due Earlier!

The deadline for applications for the student travel grant has been moved from April 11 to March 31st. Find more information on the Attend page.

March 10, 2025
News Program

Workshops and tutorials are online!

We have published the list of all accepted Workshop and Tutorial for ICWSM 2025. Please find more information on the Accepted contributions page.

February 4, 2025
News Deadline

ICWSM Adamic-Glance Distinguished Early Career Award - Call for Nominations

We are now accepting nominations for the ICWSM Adamic-Glance Distinguished Early Career Award. Self-nominations and nominations from the community are welcome. Nominations received by March 15th, 2025 will be considered for this year's award. For more details, please visit the Awards page.

January 16, 2025
Deadline Program

Call for workshops extended!

We have extended the deadline for workshop submissions to January 24, 2025. Please find more information on the Submit page.

December 3, 2024
Deadline Program

Calls for datasets, posters, and demos published!

We are happy to announce the publication of the calls for datasets, posters, and demos for ICWSM 2025. Find more information on the Submit page.

November 22, 2024
Deadline Program

Calls for workshops and tutorials published!

We are pleased to announce the publication of the calls for workshops and tutorials for ICWSM 2025. Please check the Submit page for more information.

November 20, 2024
News

We are now on Bluesky! 🦋

Please follow us on Bluesky to stay updated on the latest news and announcements for ICWSM 2025.



The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) is a forum for researchers from multiple disciplines to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of investigating the interplay of web and society. This overall theme includes research on new perspectives in social theories, as well as computational algorithms for analyzing digital traces of human activities or behaviors in social settings. ICWSM is a singularly fitting venue for research that blends social science and computational approaches to answer important and challenging questions about human social behavior through online traces while advancing computational tools for vast and unstructured data.

ICWSM, now in its nineteenth year, has become one of the premier venues for computational social science and social computing. Previous years of ICWSM have featured papers, posters, and demos that draw upon a wide spectrum of disciplines from computational sciences (e.g., network science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, test/data mining, natural language processing, image/multimedia processing, human computer interaction) to social sciences (e.g., sociology, communication, political science, anthropology, psychology, economics, digital humanities). Note that papers focusing solely on the advancement of algorithmic components, or which use Web data only as an artifact (for instance, in method evaluation) are out of scope. Ideal submissions should speak to research questions of societal relevance.

We invite original work that utilizes diverse digitally mediated data sources such as web navigation traces, traces from apps, social media traces, data from online platforms such as microblogs (e.g., X/ formerly Twitter), wiki-based knowledge sharing sites (e.g., Wikipedia), online news media (e.g., Huffington Post), forums, mailing lists, newsgroups, community media sites (e.g., YouTube, Instagram), Q&A sites (e.g., Quora, Stack Overflow), user review sites (e.g., Yelp, Amazon.com), search platforms and social curation sites (e.g., Reddit, Pinterest). Adapting to our continuously evolving field, we are open to new forms of technologically mediated human or society-related data sources (e.g., mobility traces, satellite data) and methods that advance our understanding of society and the influence of the web on it.

The uniqueness of the venue and the quality of submissions have contributed to a rapidly growing conference, and a competitive acceptance rate of approximately 20 to 30% for full-length research papers published in the proceedings by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

ICWSM-2025 will be held from June 23 - 26, 2025, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

Adamic-Glance Keynote

Misinformation on WhatsApp: Insights from a large data donation program

Kiran Garimella
Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers

ABSTRACT

This research presents the first comprehensive analysis of problematic content circulation on WhatsApp, focusing on private group messages during the national election in India. Through a large-scale data donation program, we obtained a representative sample of users from Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state with over 200 million inhabitants. This extensive dataset allowed us to examine the prevalence of misinformation, political propaganda, AI-generated content, and hate speech across thousands of users. Our findings reveal a significant presence of political content, with two concerning trends emerging: widespread circulation of previously debunked misinformation and targeted hate speech against Muslim communities. While AI-generated content was minimal, the persistence of debunked misinformation suggests serious limitations in the reach and effectiveness of fact-checking efforts within these private groups.

This study makes several key contributions. First, it provides unprecedented quantitative insights into everyday WhatsApp usage patterns and content sharing behaviors. Second, it highlights unique challenges in moderating end-to-end encrypted platforms. Third, it introduces innovative data donation methodologies and tools for collecting representative samples from traditionally inaccessible platforms. The implications of our research extend beyond WhatsApp, offering valuable insights for developing effective content moderation policies across encrypted communication channels. Our data collection approach can be adapted for studying other platforms, particularly crucial in an environment where API access is increasingly restricted.

BIOGRAPHY

Kiran Garimella is an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers. Prior to joining Rutgers, Garimella was the Michael Hammer postdoc at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT and a postdoc at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on using digital data for social good, including areas like polarization, misinformation and human migration. His work on studying and mitigating polarization on social media won the best paper awards at top computer science conferences. Kiran received his Ph.D. in computer science at Aalto University, Finland, and Masters & Bachelors from IIIT Hyderabad, India. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, Barcelona, and QCRI, Doha.


Editors In Chief

Yu-Ru Lin

Yelena Mejova

Jisun An

Steering Committee

Ingmar Weber

Jeff Hancock

Kate Starbird

Ceren Budak

Fred Morstatter

Jürgen Pfeffer

Yu-Ru Lin

Munmun De Choudhury

Rumi Chunara

Aron Culotta

Brooke F. Wells

Daniele Quercia

Meeyoung Cha

Jason Nurse

Afra Mashadi

Kenny Joseph

Ella Haig

Jisun An

Diyi Yang

Yelena Mejova

Luca Maria Aiello

Tanu Mitra

Jahna Otterbacher

Miriam Redi

Robert West

Kiran Garimella

Ancsa Hannak

Agnes Horvat

Daniel Romero

Kokil Jaidka

Buffalo

Buffalo, U.S.

2024

Limassol

Limassol, Cyprus

2023

Atlanta

Atlanta, Georgia and Online

2022

Virtual Conference

Virtual Conference

2021

Virtual Conference

Virtual Conference

2020

Munich

Munich, Germany

2019

Stanford

Stanford, U.S.

2018

Montreal

Montreal, Canada

2017

Cologne

Cologne, Germany

2016

Oxford

Oxford, U.K.

2015

Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor, U.S.

2014

Boston

Boston, U.S.

2013

Dublin

Dublin, Ireland

2012

Barcelona

Barcelona, Spain

2011

Washington D.C.

Washington D.C., U.S.

2010

San Jose

San Jose, U.S.

2009

Seattle

Seattle, U.S.

2008

Boulder

Boulder, U.S.

2007