Connectionists: Extended deadline: Disinformation, Hoaxes and Propaganda within Online Social Networks and Media

[Marinella Petrocchi]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Elsevier - Online Social Networks and Media Journal
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/online-social-networks-and-media/

Special Issue on Disinformation, Hoaxes and Propaganda within Online 
Social Networks and Media

Submission Deadline Extended: *April, 30 2020*

Note from guest editors: due to the COVID-19 impact on our research and 
lives, we believe it is fair to give more time to our authors. We 
decided to extend the deadline for six weeks, so everyone has time to 
adapt to the new situation and polish the papers for our special issue. 
We welcome papers that show analysis on dis/misinformation about 
COVID-19.

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Manuscripts can be submitted continuously until the deadline. Once a 
paper is submitted, the review process will start immediately. Accepted 
papers will be published continuously in the journal (in the first issue 
available as soon as the paper is accepted). All accepted papers will be 
listed together in an online virtual special issue published in the 
journal website.

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Online Social Networks and Media natively convey the information quickly 
and diffusely. They are 'optimised' for posting and sharing catchy and 
sensationalist news. Problematic messages may span biased information 
aiming to influence communities and agendas to deliberate lies meant to 
mislead users. Whatever the strategy adopted for spreading false news 
(like support of automatic accounts and presence of trolls to inflame 
crowds), this would not be effective if there were no audience willing 
to believe them. The quest for belonging to a community and reassuring 
answers, the adherence to one's viewpoint: these are key factors for 
people to contribute to the success of disinformation diffusion. That's 
why the battle against disinformation must be fought at both 
technological and sociological level.

This special issue seeks high-quality scientific articles (both 
theoretical and experimental) on using Online Social Networks and Media 
(OSNEM) data for the analysis of hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation 
fabrication and spread on social media, automatic techniques to be 
embedded in OSNEM platforms to block/prevent their diffusion, and 
countermeasures to dissuade people to believe/diffuse them.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the design and 
implementation of methodologies and techniques to detect disinformation 
and/or raise the users' awareness to the threats represented by 
disinformation, including:
- Modelling and analysis techniques to study/predict the dynamics of the 
spread of disinformation;
- Text mining, graph mining, network and behavioural analyses to detect 
disinformation;
- Reputation systems to support the detection - or mitigate the effects 
- of disinformation;
- Disinformation strategies;
- Understanding and guiding the societal reaction in the presence of 
disinformation;
- Supervised/unsupervised approaches to let accounts’ automation degree 
emerge from the crowd;
- Computational fact-checking;
- Detection of information polarization in online communities;
- Definition and evaluation of novel metrics to verify news veracity;
- Domain-free approaches to fight disinformation (i.e., context 
independent w.r.t. accounts, news, reviews, posts, tweets, etc..);
- Interplay between OSNEM social network structures and 
diffusion/prevention of disinformation;
- Behavioural models behind disinformation diffusion/prevention obtained 
from large-scale OSNEM data.

Data-driven approaches, supported by publicly available datasets, are 
more than welcome.

Guest Editors
Yelena Mejova, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
Marinella Petrocchi, IIT-CNR, Italy
Carolina Scarton, University of Sheffield, UK

*** Instructions for submission ***
Manuscripts must not have been previously published nor currently under 
review by other journals or conferences. Papers previously published in 
conference proceedings are eligible for submission if the submitted 
manuscript is a substantial revision and extension of the conference 
version. In this case, authors should indicate the previous 
publication(s) in the cover letter and are also required to submit their 
published conference article(s) and a summary document explaining the 
enhancements made in the journal version.
The submission website for this journal is located at
https://www.editorialmanager.com/osnem/default.aspx.

Please select "VSI:Disinformation" when you reach the "Article Type" 
step in the submission process. To ensure that all manuscripts are 
correctly identified, for consideration by the special issue, the 
authors should indicate in the cover letter that the manuscript has been 
submitted for the special issue on Disinformation, Hoaxes and Propaganda 
within Online Social Networks and Media.

For further information, please contact the guest editors at
yelena.mejova at gmail.com
marinella.petrocchi at iit.cnr.it
c.scarton at sheffield.ac.uk

-- 
Marinella Petrocchi
Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT)
National Research Council (CNR)
Pisa (Italy)

Mobile: +39 348 8260773
Skype: m_arinell_a
Web: http://www.iit.cnr.it/staff/marinella.petrocchi

`Luck is a matter of geography' (Bandabardo')