Today, online platforms navigate a growing range of harms, including misinformation, hate speech, harassment, exploitative material, and coordinated manipulation. Content moderation is an essential yet increasingly complex component of how these platforms maintain safe, trustworthy, and inclusive online environments. The rapid advancement of technologies such as generative AI, evolving platform infrastructures, and decentralized moderation systems further complicates this landscape, introducing new forms of misbehavior while also creating new opportunities for moderation research and practice. At the same time, content moderation extends well beyond automated detection: it involves defining and interpreting community guidelines, designing and evaluating interventions, supporting moderators and affected users, and balancing competing values such as safety, transparency, privacy, and freedom of expression. Addressing these challenges requires a holistic, multidisciplinary perspective that bridges socio-technical approaches, human-centered design, governance, ethics, law, and regulation.

This workshop aims to foster a comprehensive dialogue on content moderation and platform governance, engaging researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds, including CSCW, HCI, social computing, computational social science, law, communication, trust and safety, and related fields. Building on the strong engagement and interdisciplinary discussions of the first COMPASS workshop held at ICWSM 2025, this second edition will advance understanding, spark collaborations, and drive innovation across the full spectrum of moderation challenges, from community governance and intervention design to evaluation, transparency, and accountability.

Given CSCW’s longstanding commitment to understanding complex socio-technical systems and the interplay between technology and society, COMPASS will provide an ideal venue for meaningful discussion, cross-disciplinary exchange, and actionable insights into the moderation and governance challenges shaping contemporary online ecosystems.

Submission Guidelines

We welcome the following types of submissions:

1. Research papers (up to 10 pages including references, but excluding appendices) presenting full-fledged, mature scientific work. This can either be novel or already submitted/published at another venue.

2. Resource papers (up to 10 pages including references, but excluding appendices) presenting datasets, applications, softwares, or demos. These can either be novel or already submitted/published at another venue.

3. Work-in-progress papers (up to 5 pages including references, but excluding appendices) presenting preliminary results.

4. Vision and position papers (up to 5 pages including references and appendices) presenting new ideas.

List of Topics

The workshop welcomes contributions spanning topics such as:

• Community guidelines and governance: Design, evolution, and impact of platform policies, and their alignment with community norms and regulatory frameworks.

• Moderation interventions and downstream effects: Design and evaluation of interventions (e.g., removals, warnings, visibility modifications), including causal inference and downstream effects.

• Metrics and evaluation: Measures of moderation effectiveness, platform health, and societal impact.

• Human-centered moderation: Interactions between human moderators, users, and automated systems; psychological and experiential dimensions.

• Cross-cultural and societal dimensions of moderation: Cross-cultural differences, inclusivity, and the role of diverse communities in shaping moderation practices.

• Legal and regulatory implications: Impacts of frameworks such as the DSA and AI Act on platform governance and accountability.

• Ethics and values: Trade-offs between safety, privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression.

• Data and transparency: Access to moderation data, auditing practices, and reproducibility challenges.

• Decentralized and participatory moderation: Community-driven and distributed approaches to moderation and governance.

• Emerging technologies: Moderation challenges related to generative AI, LLM-powered moderation interventions, live and real-time content, and new platform modalities.

• Moderation challenges involving vulnerable or high-profile populations: Unique moderation concerns in the context of special groups, such as politicians, activists, journalists, and children.

Committees

Program Committee

• Thales Bertaglia, Maastricht University, Netherlands
• Jie Cai, Tsinghua University, China
• Lorenzo Cima, IIT-CNR, Italy
• Jordi Guillem Condom Tibau, University of Pisa & IIT-CNR, Italy
• Daria Dergacheva, University of Bremen, Germany
• Roberto Di Pietro, KAUST, Saudi Arabia
• Robert Gorwa, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany
• Anna Monreale, University of Pisa, Italy
• Alice Qian, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Fabrizio Silvestri, "La Sapienza" University of Rome, Italy
• Benedetta Tessa, University of Pisa & IIT-CNR, Italy

(more to be announced soon)

Organizing Committee

Local Organizers

• Shagun Jhaver, Rutgers University, USA
• Sanjay Kairam, OpenAI, USA
• Koustuv Saha, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Remote Organizers

• Robyn Caplan, Duke University, USA
• Stefano Cresci, IIT-CNR, Italy
• Catalina Goanta, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
• Savvas Zannettou, TU Delft, Netherlands

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to stefano.cresci@iit.cnr.it.