Program

Tuesday, May 26

Workshops and Forums

DHOW: Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web (9:00-12:00)

Organizers: Thomas Mandl, Haiming Liu, Gautam Kishore Shahi, Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Luis-Daniel Ibáñez, and Durgesh Nandini

MESHARE: Method Sharing Retreat (9:00-16:00)

Organizers: Muhammad Taimoor, Ran Yu, Felix Victor Münch, Fakhri Momeni, Stephan Linzbach, Arnim Bleier, and Johannes Kiesel

WebPol: Getting Involved in Technology Policy for Web Researchers (13:00-16:00)

Organizers: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Virginia Dignum, Eelco Herder, Jeanna Matthews, Tom Romanoff, and James Hendler

SDW: First International Workshop on Science-Related Discourse on the Web (13:00-16:00)

Organizers: Katarina Boland, Dimitar Dimitrov, Michelle Riedlinger, Philipp Meier, Sebastian Schellhammer, and Stefan Dietze

ABIS 2026: The Effects of the Adaptive Web on Society (9:00-12:00)

Organizers: Laura Stojko, Eelco Herder, Jannis Stecker-Bischoff, Julia Seitz, Thomas Neumayr, Enes Yigitbas, and Mirjam Augstein

TSWW’26: Towards a Safer Web for Women – Second International Workshop on Protecting Women Online (13:00-16:00)

Organizers: Miriam Fernandez, Christine de Kock, Alba Morales, Arianna Muti, and Ángel Pavón Pérez

PhD Symposium (13:00-16:00)

  • Alexander Loth: The Indistinguishability Threshold: Measuring Cognitive Vulnerabilities to AI-Generated Disinformation
  • Matt Javanshir: Applying Actor-Network Theory to the UK’s Public Policy of Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Creative Industries
  • Melyssa Ortiz Quintairos Jorge: AI Governance and Public Engagement: Rethinking the Instrumentalisation of Public Trust to Drive Innovation

 

18:00-19:00    Reception Part 1 @ Staatliches Naturhistorisches Museum

Welcome and a short talk in the Braunschweig’s natural history museum, next to the conference venue Haus der Wissenschaft (follow the dinosaurs)

 

19:00-21:00   Reception Part 2 @ Haus der Wissenschaft

Informal Get-Together either in the lobby of the Haus der Wissenschaft (ground floor close to the reception desk) or in front of the building – depending on the weather. We serve German beer and snacks.

 

Wednesday, May 27

8:45-9:00          Opening and Welcome

9:00-10:00       Keynote 1 (Chair: Jennifer Golbeck)

  • James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

 

10:30-12:00     Session 1:  Discourse and Community Engagement (Chair: Miriam Fernandez)

  • Gabriela Ozegovic, Thorsten Ruprechter, and Denis Helic: Reddit’s Appetite: Predicting User Engagement with Nutritional Content
  • Rian Wagner Costa, Lívia Dâmaso, Carlos Henrique Ferreira, Carolina Xavier, and Vinícius Vieira: When Discourse Meets Behavior: Cross-Platform and Multilingual Fandom Dynamics during High-Impact Events
  • Geovana Silva de Oliveira, Ana Paula Couto Silva, Fabricio Murai, and Carlos H. G. Ferreira: Who Shapes Brazil’s Vaccine Debate? Semi-Supervised Modeling of Stance and Polarization in YouTube’s Media Ecosystem
  • Kauan Costa, Helen Lima, Carlos H. G. Ferreira, and Filipe Ribeiro: The Anatomy of Political Advertising: Spending, Efficiency, and Targeting Strategies on Meta Platforms During the Brazilian Elections
  • Alex Leitch, Celia Chen, and Jennifer Golbeck: A Digital Architecture of Belonging: Tracking Physical Community Formation Through Email Communications
  • [short] Saul S. da Rocha, Carlos H. V. Silva, Mateus J. da Silva, José T. Neto, Carlos H. G. Ferreira, and Glauber D. Gonçalves: Socio-Technical Constraints and Cross-Platform Model Generalization: Text Classification in Brazilian Public Security

 

13:00-14:30     Session 2: LLMs and Multimodal Content (Chair: Haiming Liu)

  • Md Taukir Azam Chowdhury, Vagelis Hristidis, Kevin Esterling, Jannat Ara Meem, and Zabir Al Nazi: Comparing the Subjective Opinions and Justifications of LLMs and Web Search Engines
  • Nikiforos Fasfalis, Pantelis Kyriakidis, Despoina Chatzakou, Theodora Tsikrika, Stefanos Vrochidis, and Ioannis Kompatsiaris: Interactive Clustering through Deep Metric Learning: A Study on Loss Function
  • Sedat Dogan, Nina Dethlefs, and Debarati Chakraborty: Early Multimodal Prediction of Cross-Lingual Meme Virality on Reddit: A Time-Window Analysis
  • Xiao Luo, Xiang Fang, Yuechen Wu, Preethika Chidara, and Rob Elliott: Assessing the Reliability of a Large Multimodal Model for Scoring and Reasoning Commercial Videos
  • [short] Sandy Liu, Ella Haig, and Eni Mustafaraj: Interpreting Short Social Media Videos with Multimodal LLMs: A Validation Experiment
  • [short] Gangani Ariyarathne, Isuru Ariyarathne, Greatness Emmanuel-King, Kate Lawal, and Alexander Nwala: Identifying the Geographic Foci of US Local News

 

15:00-16:30     Session 3: User Dynamics and Pattern-Detection (Chair: Johannes Kiesel)

  • Raphael Hoheisel, Tom Meurs, Jai Wientjes, Marianne Junger, Abhishta Abhishta, and Masarah Paquet-Clouston: Assessing Crime Disclosure Patterns in a Large-Scale Cybercrime Forum
  • Alessio Tosolini and Jason Jeffrey Jones: From Tumblr to Twitter: Evidence of NSFW Community Migration via Bio Keyword Prediction
  • Janine Schröder, Daniel Matter, and Juergen Pfeffer: Spread the Word! Dynamics of Collaboration in Translocal Social Movement Groups on Telegram
  • Samuel Guimarães, Filipe Ribeiro, Oana Goga, and Fabricio Benevenuto: Which Types of Brazilian Telegram Groups are More Susceptible to being Politicized?
  • Davide Bassi, Martin Pereira-Farina, and Renata Vieira: Navigating the Disagreement Space: A Case Study on Persistent YouTube Users’ Interactions in Immigration-Related Discussions

 

16:30-17:30    WSTNet Labs Panel  (Moderator: Matthew Weber)

  • Steffen Staab, University of Stuttgart
  • Jürgen Pfeffer, Technical University of Munich
  • Manfred Hauswirth, TU Berlin
  • Dame Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
  • Closing Commentator: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University

 

 

17:30-19:00     Poster Session

Thursday, May 28

9:00-10:00       Keynote 2 (Chair: Stefan Dietze)

  • Steffen Staab, University of Stuttgart

 

10:30-12:00     Session 4:  Toxicity, Health, and User Interactions on Platforms (Chair: Wolf-Tilo Balke)

  • Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Ruining Zhao, Agam Goyal, Violeta Rodriguez, Paul Bloom, Navin Kumar, Hari Sundaram, and Koustuv Saha: Detecting Early and Implicit Suicidal Ideation via Longitudinal and Information Environment Signals on Social Media
  • Tianwei Xu and Yohei Seki: Transformer-based Risk Screening of Gaming Addiction from Reddit Posts and Posting Burstiness
  • Sehrish Qummar, Alireza Mohammadinodooshan, and Niklas Carlsson: Uneven Toxicity Dynamics: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Toxicity and Engagement in Instagram News
  • Soroush Karimi, Marcos Oliveira, and Diogo Pacheco: The Hidden Rise of Toxicity: How Retweets Obscure Increasing Hostility in Brazilian Politics
  • [TWEB] Raphael Menges, Steffen Staab, Christoph Schaefer, Tina Walber, and Chandan Kumar: What Did My Users Experience? Discovering Visual Stimuli on Graphical User Interfaces of the Web
  • [short] Luka Bekavac and Simon Mayer: Broken Links and Fading Stories: How Dominant Online Platforms Subvert the Hypermedia Foundation of the Web

 

13:00-14:30     Session 5: Framing, Fairness, and Privacy (Chair: Eelco Herder)

  • Arpan Dam, Sougata Roy, and Bivas Mitra: FairGCL: Embedding Fairness for Influence Maximization with Graph Contrastive Learning
  • Nandini Arimanda, Achyuth Mukund, Sakthi Balan Muthiah, and Rajesh Sharma: Invisible Influences: Investigating Implicit Intersectional Biases through Persona Engineering in Large Language Models
  • Marisa Vasconcelos, Giovana Machado, Igor Costa, and Jussara Almeida: Framing AI on YouTube: A Comparative Analysis of Discourse in Brazil and the United States
  • Upasana Dutta and Yasmine Houri: Framing the Fringe: Dynamics of Ingroup and Outgroup Narratives in Fringe Telegram Channels
  • Fangping Lan, Abdullah Aljebreen, and Eduard Dragut: Why They Link: An Intent Taxonomy for Including Hyperlinks in Social Posts
  • [short] Akitaka Yamashita and Keishi Tajima: Home Location Leakage via Weather-Related Social Media Posts

 

15:00-16:30     Session 6: Influence and Personalization in LLMs (Chair: Luis-Daniel Ibáñez)

  • Georg Ahnert, Antonio Ferrara, and Claudia Wagner: Fairness-Aware Ranking Recovery from Pairwise Comparisons
  • Arpan Dam, Hunny Chandra, and Bivas Mitra: DTInf: Dynamic Topic-Aware Influence Maximization with Incremental Embedding Updates
  • Rustom M. Dubash and Sorelle A. Friedler: Self-Promotion in LLM Recommendations
  • [short] Gourab K. Patro, Srimoyee Mukhopadhyay, Arsh Banerjee, Daniel Abreu, Kevin Perkins, Siddharth Kotwal, Vijay Nagaraj Sivakumaran, Aram Bidzyan, and Diganta Nayak: APLE: A Framework for Adaptable and Personalized Live Explainability for Recommender Systems
  • [short] Veronika Batzdorfer and Oliver Tölkes: Directional Semantic Drift Across Grokipedia Versions: A Diffusion-Manifold Analysis
  • [short] Chengqian Wang, Arjumand Younus, and Kalpana Shankar: Analysing Logs of LLM-Based Counselling-Style Conversation Agents: A Perspective from NLP

 

16:30-17:15   Test-of-Time Award Winner Talk (Chair: James Hendler)

  • The winner will be announced in this session

 

19:00-22:00   Conference Dinner @ Dornse (Main Hall in the Old Town Hall)

The conference dinner will be part of a city reception and takes place in the Old Town Hall’s main festive hall, the “Dornse”. Address: Altstadtmarkt 7, Braunschweig. More information will follow soon.

 

Friday, May 29

9:00-10:00       Keynote 3 (Chair: Gianluca Demartini)

Anni Rowland-Campbell, Intersticia

Hannah Stewart, Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Ghada Ibrahim, Intersticia

10:30-12:00     Session 7:  Behavior and Safety (Chair: Lydia Manikonda)

  • Henry Tari and Adriana Iamnitchi: Measuring Privacy vs. Fidelity in Synthetic Social Media Datasets
  • Isuru Ariyarathne, Gangani Ariyarathne, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, and Alexander Nwala: Behavior Change as a Signal for Identifying Social Media Manipulation
  • Dimosthenis Antypas, Christian Arnold, Jose Camacho-Collados, Nedjma Ousidhoum, and Carla Perez-Almendros: Causal Effects of Politically Charged Words in Social Media Discussions: A Large-Scale Case Study about UK Politics on Reddit
  • Tom Bidewell, Artemis Deligianni, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Clare Llewellyn, and Björn Ross: Gendered Communication Patterns of Political Elites on Truth Social
  • Adyn Gallagher, Hanjing Shi, and Dominic DiFranzo: Designing for Safety in Sensitive Online Spaces: The Role of Pseudonymity and Verification Friction
  • [short] Akrati Saxena, Aman Singh, Harsh Saxena, and Rasmus Helles: Tracking the Trackers: Structural Evolution of Web-Tracking on Educational Websites

 

13:00-14:30     Session 8: Datasets and News Analysis (Chair: Florian Plötzky)

  • Fakhri Momeni, Sarah Sajid, and Johannes Kiesel: From Guidelines to Practice: Evaluating the Reproducibility of Methods in Computational Social Science
  • Jaein Shim, Maximilian Kreutner, and Markus Strohmaier: Long-Term Topic Dynamics in U.S. News Coverage
  • Farhan Samir, Jappun Dhillon, Meghna Ravikumar, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, and Vered Shwartz: Quantifying Media Representation Dynamics Across 25 Years of News Reporting on Policing-related Deaths
  • Jessica Stiegelmayer, Arabella Petz, Leo Bruckmüller, Jakob Fehle, Michael Achmann-Denkler, and Christian Wolff: Exploring Large-Scale Social Media Data Using Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling – A Case Study of Instagram Posts in Context of the 2024 German Government Crisis
  • [short] Ira Kokoshko and Robert Jäschke: Ancient GeoCities: A Dataset of Temporally Annotated Web Pages

 

14:30-15:00     Closing and Awards

 16:00-19:30     Brave Conversations

Organized by INTERSTICIA and Haus der Wissenschaft.