The annual Conference for Truth and Trust Online (TTO) assembles diverse stakeholders including practitioners, technologists, and academics, to address the critical issues of online misinformation and disinformation. The conference fosters a unique environment for sharing innovative technical strategies aimed at enhancing the credibility of online communications. Attendees seek to devise solutions to the challenges confronting online platforms.

TTO 2021 spanned two days, with a variety of talks, panels, and interactive workshops. Key topics explored included image forensic tools, the correlation between online misinformation and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, and the significance of reliable national statistics for fact-checking. An interactive workshop by François D’Astier highlighted practical aspects of debunking and fact-checking.

Prominent keynote speakers included Gianluca Stringhini, Lyric Jain, and Kalina Bontcheva, who presented on comprehensive analysis of online disinformation, experiences in misinformation combat, and the status of AI-driven disinformation analysis and moderation. The event also featured discussions on regulatory frameworks and the readiness of computational fact-checking tools for real-world use.

Agenda:

Day 1 – Thursday, October 7

• Opening Session
• Keynote Talk 1 by Lyric Jain: “Experiences from the frontline: Winning, losing and learning in the fight against misinformation”
• Session 1:
  • Marina Gardella: “Enhanced Image Forensic Tools for Fact-Checkers”
  • Francesco Pierri: “Online Misinformation is Linked to COVID-19 Vaccination Hesitancy and Refusal”
  • Fionntán O’Donnell: “Why good national statistics are so important for fact-checkers”
  • Hannah Rose Kirk: “Understanding and Detecting Online Hate Expressed in Emoji”
• Interactive Workshop by François D’Astier: “Verification for All”
• Live Panel 1: “Regulation and Platforms: How can practice inform policy?” with Farah Lalani, Susan Ness, Yoel Roth, Jillian York
• Keynote Talk 2 by Gianluca Stringhini: “A Large-Scale, Multi-Platform, and Multi-Modal Look at Online Disinformation”
• Session 2:
  • Preslav Nakov: “A Holistic Approach to Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic in Social Media: Modeling the Perspective of Journalists, Fact-Checkers, Social Media Platforms, Policy Makers, and Society”
  • Giovanni Da San Martino: “The Middle Ground Between Manual and Automatic Fact-Checking: Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims”
  • Michael Simeone, Kristy Roschke and Shawn Walker: “How Misinformation Works for People, Not On Them”
  • Ashkan Kazemi, Scott Hale: “Tiplines to Combat Misinformation on Encrypted Platforms: A Case Study of the 2019 Indian Election on WhatsApp”

Day 2 – Friday, October 8

• Session 3:
  • Amruta Deshpande and Justin Hendrix: “Visualizing the Dimensions of Disinformation Campaigns”
  • Tanmoy Chakraborty: “Blackmarket-driven Collusive Attacks on Online Media Platforms”
  • Erik Brand: “E-BART: Jointly Predicting and Explaining Truthfulness”
  • Gabriel Lima: “People Expect Joint Accountability for Online Misinformation”
• Session 4:
  • Diego Saez-Trumper and Pablo Aragon: “An Overview of Research on Knowledge Integrity in Wikimedia Projects”
  • Carolina Scarton: “Cross-lingual Rumour Stance Classification: A First Study with BERT and Machine Translation”
  • Bahruz Jabiyev: “Game of FAME: Automatic Detection of FAke MEmes”
  • Dilrukshi Gamage: “The Emergence of “Deepfakes” and Its Societal Implications: A Systematic Review”
• Live Panel 2: “Computational fact-checking tools: are they ready for the real world?” with Preslav Nakov, Jennifer Mathieu, Shalini Joshi, Jochen Spangenberg, David Corney
• Keynote Talk 3 by Kalina Bontcheva: “AI-driven disinformation analysis and moderation: Are we there yet?”
• Session 5:
  • Tanu Mitra: “Algorithmic Governance: Auditing Search and Recommendation Algorithms for Misinformation”
  • Mateus Batista Santos, Tamiris Tinti Volcean: “AletheiaFact.org: Creating A Digital Platform to Empower Journalists And Fact-Checkers During The Brazilian Presidential Elections”
  • Yunke QU: “Human-in-the-Loop Systems for Truthfulness: A Study of Human and Machine Confidence”
• Session 5 (continued):
  • Mike Pappas: “Detecting Harm in Voice Communications”
  • Claire Leibowicz and Emily Saltz: “Misinformation Interventions Are Common, Divisive, And Poorly Understood. How Should They Be Designed?”
  • Yiqing Hua: “Alternative Monetization on YouTube”
• Closing Session