Mediate 2023: News Media and Computational Journalism Workshop

Talia Tseriotou, Dina Pisarevskaya, Elena Kochkina, Marya Bazzi, Maria Liakata, Arkaitz Zubiaga

ICWSM. 2023.

The advent of new technologies and platforms has transformed both the production and the consumption of news and information, impacting greatly the social and political landscape internationally. The challenges that result from this unprecedented scale of information diffusion have become apparent to governments, online platforms, and the general public, especially in light of events such as the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 infodemic and recent political events. During the fourth rendition of MEDIATE, we shed light on the ever-pertinent topic of misinformation research, and studied it via three themes: (1) automated journalism; (2) explainable and multi-modal verification; and (3) content moderation. This workshop brought together media practitioners and academics to discuss research in the context of the three themes, with particular emphasis on cross-discipline interaction. With three keynotes from both academia and industry, one contributed talk and seven accepted papers, the workshop explored a wide range of topics. While keynote talks covered different aspects of addressing misinformation, they highlighted automation efforts through real world fact-checking infrastructures, multi-modal architectures and different tools including flagging systems beyond big-tech profits to ensure users' safety. The contributed sections presented architectures, datasets, analyses and automation systems towards the detection and remedy of bias, hate speech, misinformation as well as fact-checking in journalism and social media. Overall, the diversity of the presented topics and the overlap across thematic chapters allowed for fruitful discussions, and, most importantly, it opened avenues for collaboration and future research.