DETOX
countering the degradation of social media
Workshop in conjuction with the 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2025
About The Event
Despite their integral role in modern life, social media platforms increasingly manifest patterns of inequality, polarization, and centralization, failing to fulfill their promise of equitable discourse spaces. This workshop explores strategies to counter these degradation patterns, focusing on how users actively resist and reshape their digital environments. We invite discussions on collective resistance mechanisms, platform migration dynamics, and structural factors that influence these transformation efforts. The workshop combines technical perspectives on alternative designs and sustainability metrics with insights from policy and social sciences to advance our understanding of building healthier social media ecosystems.
Submission deadline
March 31, 2025 April 14, 2025
Pitch talk deadline
June 16, 2025 (23.59 AoE)
Topics
The workshop invites submissions on a range of topics, including but not limited to:
- Measuring and addressing user dynamics against social media degradation
- Social influence of social media degradation awareness
- Measuring and reducing polarization
- Collective User Migration
- Diffusion of new social norms
- Policies and social norms for healthy digital spaces
- Mixed-methods approaches (e.g., from sociology, digital humanities, psychology) to counter social media degradation
- Improvements of UX in the face of social media degradation
- Analysis of social networks and communities with explicit signs of social media degradation
- Reduction of inequalities
- Analysis of conversations relevant to social media degradation
- Dynamics and structure of social graphs in relation to social media degradation
Keynote
Max Falkenberg
Central European University,
Vienna
Structures of toxic engagement on social media: Abusive messaging, content moderation, and deplatforming
There is broad concern about the potentially harmful nature of social media, especially in relation to the spread of mis- and disinformation, and abusive messaging between individuals. However, many social media studies take a relatively narrow lens to understanding these issues, focusing often on only the US, only English language content, or on only one social media platform (often Twitter or Reddit). In this talk I will discuss two recent studies which try to take small steps towards expanding the lens of social media research. First, I will discuss a study on social media deplatforming where we were able to track the migration of users from Twitter to the US far-right Twitter clone Gettr, and were able to distinguish between those users migrating because they were banned from Twitter, and those who retained access to their Twitter accounts. Second, I will discuss a study where we looked at the patterns of toxic messaging on Twitter across 9 countries and in 7 languages, highlighting the common and unique aspects of abusive in- and out-group messaging between different political communities in different countries. Both studies align with my interest in bringing greater cross-platform and cross-country context to social media research.
Max Falkenberg is a computational social scientist and Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria, as well as a visiting researcher at IT:U. His research applies network science to key problems in computational social science, with a particular focus on the structural underpinnings of political polarization, climate communication and politics, and climate finance. He holds Visiting Fellow positions at IT:U in Linz, Austria, and at the Institute for Sustainable Resources at University College London (UCL), UK. He completed a PhD in Physics at Imperial College London in 2022 and a postdoctoral position in the Department of Mathematics at City, University of London in 2024.
Program
This program is subject to change
Welcome
by the organisers
Invited speaker Max Falkenberg
Structures of toxic engagement on social media: Abusive messaging, content moderation, and deplatforming
S1: Contributed talks
S1.1 Luigi Arminio
Intersecting Views: Toxicity, Misinformation, and Polarization in the different fames of Climate Change Discourse
S1.2 Przemyslaw Grabowicz
Political Biases on X before the 2025 German Federal Election
Pitch Talks
List of speakers
Coffee Break & Detox Tables
S2: Contributed talks
S2.1 Elisabetta Biondi
The Role of Influence and Information Flow in Polarization: from Classical to Cascade-Driven Friedkin-Johnsen Model
S2.2 Jan Elfes
Sticking to the Narrative? Linking Search Intent on YouTube and Comment Narrative Exposure
S3: Contributed talks
S3.1 Georgios Panayiotou
Towards intersectional fairness in community detection
S3.2 Kiran Garimella
Private Sharing of Public Content on Facebook
Closing remarks
Pitch Talks
- Arianna Pera — Narratives of Climate Change on Social Media
- Aleksandar Tomašević — Simulating toxic online communities with YSocial
- Elyas Meguellati — The duality of persuasion between generation and detection
- Eddie L. Ungless — Experiences of Censorship on TikTok Across Marginalised Identities
- Patrick Gerard — Tracking Misinformation Across Social Media Ecosystems
- Gianluca Nogara — Reducing online toxicity: the case of black box models
- Sarah Masud — Proactive moderation as a stepping stone to reducing hateful content
- Lucio La Cava — Moderating Decentralized Online Social Media Using Open LLMs
Submissions
Submissions are currently closed
The workshop welcomes submissions in two formats: contributed talks and pitch talks.
Contributed Talks
Deadline: March 31, 2025
For contributed talks, submissions will undergo single-blind peer review with a minimum of two reviewers per paper.
According to the main conference guidelines, all papers must be submitted as high-resolution PDF files,
formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style, for US Letter (8.5" x 11") paper,
using Type 1 or TrueType fonts (available templates: AAAI 2025 Author Kit on Overleaf
or AAAI 2025 Author Kit.zip [Word | LaTeX]).
Authors can submit either a 5-page short paper
(with the fifth page reserved exclusively for references)
presenting ongoing, unpublished work with experimental results,
which will be included in the workshop proceedings, or a 2-page abstract (references not included in the page limit count)
covering ongoing or published research (non-archival).
Submit your work via the CMT portal: CMT
Proceedings are out! Check them out here
Pitch Talks
Deadline: June 16, 2025 (23.59 AoE)
The pitch talks session offers a dynamic, fast-paced format where researchers have two minutes to present their work and research identity. This innovative format welcomes both established researchers and newcomers to share their work at any stage - from published results to emerging ideas. Submissions for pitch talks are handled through a simple online form asking for a title and a very short abstract (online form) and reviewed by the workshop organizers. This format emphasizes engaging communication over technical depth, creating an energetic atmosphere as speakers present back-to-back. Authors whose works are not selected for contributed talks can be invited to participate in the pitch talks session.
Fill the form for Pitch Talks: Submit here
For questions related to the submission or participation, please contact the organisers at gald@itu.dk.
Event Venue
Aalborg University
Copenhagen, DK
The DETOX Workshop will be held in conjuction with the AAAI ICWSM 2025 Conference, hosted at the
building A of Aalborg University
A. C. Meyers Vænge 15, 2450 Copenhagen, Denmark
Organizers
Alessia Galdeman
ITU of Copenhagen
Alessandro Galeazzi
University of Padova, Italy
Eugenia Polizzi
National Research Council, Italy
Luca Maria Aiello
ITU Copenhagen
Program Committee
Alessia Antelmi, University of Turin
Anders Giovanni Møller, IT University of Copenhagen
Andrea Michienzi, University of Pisa
Anees Baqir, Northeastern University London
Arianna Pera, IT University of Copenhagen
Jacob Aarup Dalsgaard, University of Copenhagen
Lucio La Cava, University of Calabria