OHARS: Second workshop on online misinformation-and harm-aware recommender systems

Abstract

Recommender systems play a central role in online information consumption and user decision-making by leveraging user-generated information at scale to assist users in finding relevant information and establishing new social relationships. Just as recommendation techniques have become powerful tools that are inserted in most social platforms, they could also involuntarily spread unwanted content and other types of online harms. The same fundamental concepts on which these techniques rely make them facilitators of such unwanted diffusion. To increase the user-perceived quality of recommender systems and mitigating the negative effects of the multiple forms of online harms, it is essential to provide recommender systems with harm-aware mechanisms. To further research in this direction, this Second edition of the Workshop on Online Misinformation-and Harm-Aware Recommender Systems (OHARS 2021) aimed at fostering research in recommender systems that can mitigate the negative effects of online harms by fostering the recommendation of safe content and trustworthy users, with a special interest in research tackling the negative effects of the propagation of harmful content referring to the COVID-19 crisis.