The Web provides a valuable space for individuals to interact with each other, and read, publish and share content. Despite these benefits, the proliferation of virality and anonymity in the modern Web has resulted in a breeding ground for online misbehavior and compromised cybersafety in varying forms such as fraudulent engagement, misinformation and propaganda, user deception and scams, harassment, hate speech, cyberthreats, cyberbullying and more. These issues have severe negative impacts in terms of manipulated user perception and increased exposure to harmful and offensive content at best, and social, psychological and physical harm at worst. Thus, they unsurprisingly incur large social and financial costs from the perspectives of online social platforms who aim to improve user experience and encourage web activity.

The study of these topics has become especially crucial in recent years, due to the constant increase in abuse vectors and tactics, and has taken a social spotlight due to its widespread ramifications. The CyberSafety2019 workshop provides an interdisciplinary venue for researchers in various computational fields including network science, machine learning, data mining, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, web systems, security and privacy and more, to gather and present recent advances in research.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Bots, cyborgs, and automated accounts
  • Fraudulent and inflated engagement
  • Fake reviewers and reviews
  • Scams and deception
  • Hate speech
  • Harassment and cyberthreats
  • Cyberbullying
  • Flashers
  • Misbehavior and its relation to misinformation
  • Misbehavior spread
  • Adversarial analysis
  • Empirical impacts of online misbehavior
  • Enforcement and usable security measures
  • Characterization and case studies
  • Detection methods