To address some of the emerging issues that accompany collaboration and social media systems, we invite submissions to the new track on “Adversarial Coordination in Collaboration and Social Media Systems” by the deadline June 15, 2021.

Collaboration systems have long been used to support individuals to work together to attain their goals. With the widespread popularity of social media technologies, the pervasive expansion of immediate many-to-many connections has introduced new dynamics amongst and between users, companies, and advocates that pertain to all forms of political, economic, and personal life. While these dynamics imply various positive consequences for the civil society (e.g., greatly unrestrained access to sharing and collecting information), they also introduce severe issues of coordinated adversary behaviors (e.g., coordinated inauthentic behavior, cybermobbing, distortion of the public discourse, proliferation of unreliable information, relinquished on- and offline privacy).

The rise of coordinated adversarial behaviors in collaboration and social media systems deserves more scholarly and public attention, because of their devastating consequences to individuals and society. Furthermore, system providers and platform regulators struggle to develop effective means to counteract these undesirable and destructive issues. There is also a need to conduct theory-guided studies to investigate prevention and intervention strategies for coordinated adversary behaviors in collaboration and social media systems. Thus, the aim of this minitrack is to identify, conceptualize, and assess these emergent cutting-edge issues as well as their actual or potential counter mechanisms.

The minitrack intends to inform the respective decision making of regulators and tech companies from an Information Systems standpoint. Researchers are invited to adopt a pessimistic perspective (i.e., extent to which collaboration and social media systems cause or prolong problems) or an optimistic view (i.e., ways to prevent and mitigate these problems) when addressing coordinated adversarial behaviors in collaboration and social media systems. We also welcome papers examining the synergies of collaboration and social media systems and exploring the potential, social and other impacts of integrated systems. This minitrack is open to all types of research, conceptual, theoretical and/or empirical. Examples of possible topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Cybermobbing, cyberbullying, cyberharassment, online disinhibition, hate speech, trolling
  • Digital vigilantism, shaming, doxing, hacktivism, human flesh search engine
  • (Violent) Online extremism and cyberterrorism
  • Mis- and disinformation, fake news, deception
  • Coordinated inauthentic behavior, astroturfing, sockpuppeting
  • Network polarization, echo-chambers, filter bubbles
  • Prevention and intervention mechanisms, balancing the protection of civil liberties and national security, censorship, deplatforming, content monitoring
  • Policy, governance, and platform (self) regulation
  • Privacy protection and violations, dark pattern design

More Information: https://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-55/collaboration-systems-and-technologies/

Based on our successful experiences with the Social Media and e-Business Transformation minitrack in previous years (HICSS 2012-2021), high quality and relevant papers from this mini-track will be selected for fast-tracked development towards Internet Research (www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/intr<http://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/intr>). Internet Research (IntR) is an international and refereed journal that is indexed and abstracted in major databases (e.g., SSCI, SCI, ABI/INFORM Global), with an impact factor of 4.708 in 2019.

Mini-track Co-Chairs:
Christy M.K. Cheung, Hong Kong Baptist University (Primary Contact)
Marten Risius, University of Queensland
Matthew K.O. Lee, City University of Hong Kong
Christian Wagner, City University of Hong Kong