Overview

The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) is taking place on July 31st or August 1st 2025, as part of ACL 2025 in Vienna.

Digital technologies have brought significant benefits to society, transforming how people connect, communicate, and interact. However, these same technologies have also enabled the widespread dissemination and amplification of abusive and harmful content, such as hate speech, harassment, and misinformation. Given the sheer volume of content shared online, addressing abuse and harm at scale requires the use of computational tools. Yet, detecting and moderating online abuse remains a complex task, fraught with technical, social, legal, and ethical challenges. The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) invites paper submissions from a diverse range of fields, including but not limited to natural language processing, machine learning, computational social science, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies. We explicitly encourage interdisciplinary research, technical and non-technical contributions, and submissions that focus on under-resourced languages. Non-archival papers and civil society reports are also welcome. Topics covered by WOAH include, but are not limited to:

• New models or methods for detecting abusive and harmful online content, including misinformation;
• Biases and limitations in existing detection models or datasets for abusive and harmful content, especially those in commercial use;
• Development of new datasets and taxonomies for online abuse and harms;
• Novel evaluation metrics and procedures for detecting harmful content;
• Analyses of the dynamics of online abuse, its propagation, and its impact on different communities;
• Social, legal, and ethical considerations in detecting, monitoring, and moderating online abuse.

In addition, we invite submissions related to the theme for this ninth edition of WOAH, which will be Harms Beyond Hate Speech. We aim to expand the conversation beyond conventional definitions of harmful content by exploring the nuanced ways online harms manifest—such as technologically mediated inauthentic behavior, the power of technologies to reshape perceptions and opinions, and their potential to incite discrimination, hostility, violence, or even genocide. Additionally, we emphasize the diverse targets affected by such harms and the unique considerations computational interventions demand. To facilitate this exploration, we invite NLP researchers, social scientists, cultural scholars, and practitioners to engage with key issues, including child sexual abuse material, radicalization, misinformation, platform policies, security, and the politics of computational approaches. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, our goal is to deepen understanding of these complex phenomena and advance effective, ethical solutions

Organisers

• Agostina Calabrese, University of Edinburgh

• Christine De Kock, University of Melbourne

• Debora Nozza, Bocconi University

• Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Bocconi University

• Zeerak Talat, University of Edinburgh

• Francielle Vargas, University of São Paulo

Contact

If you have any questions, please get in touch at organizers@workshopononlineabuse.com