Nex-Gen and Alternative Social Media @ICWSM2025

About The Workshop

The social media landscape is undergoing significant transformation as new, alternative platforms emerge, shifting the focus from traditional, centralized networks to more user-centric experiences. Platforms like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon and the broader Fediverse are redefining how users engage with content and interact with each other, offering unique features, such as community building and feed curation, aiming to foster more authentic engagement and creative expression. Furthermore, unlike traditional platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, which are often criticized for their closed ecosystems and restricted paid access to data, these emerging platforms are characterized by greater openness to researchers, allowing for the usage of public APIs to analyze user behavior, study online communities, and experiment with new features.

This workshop aims to comprehensively explore the growing landscape of next-generation and alternative social platforms, seeking to shed light on the key challenges and opportunities inherent in this paradigm shift. Particular emphasis will be placed on how these platforms are reshaping community formation, content creation, and user engagement, and explore their broader implications for digital interactions. We believe investigating these points becomes now crucial for researchers across different fields, including computer science, human-computer interactions, and computational social science, due to the increasing interest in such platforms. This workshop has the goal of fostering interdisciplinary discussions, facilitating collaboration among diverse research communities, thereby playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of online platforms and interactions.

Topics

This workshop seeks to esplore contributions ranging multiple research fields, such as Network Science, Natural Language Processing, and Computational Social Science, aiming to facilitate the exchange of methodologies and empirical findings to foster a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the next-generation and alternative social media platforms.
The topics of interest of the Next-Gen and Alternative Social Media Workshop include but are not limited to:

Structures and dynamics in next-gen/alt social media platforms
Graph mining in next-gen/alt social media platforms
NLP in next-gen/alt social media platforms
Coordinated and cooperative user behaviors within next-gen/alt social media platforms
Migratory phenomena towards next-gen/alt social media platforms
Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news in next-gen/alt social media platforms
Content moderation in next-gen/alt social media platforms
Community search, detection, and evolution in next-gen/alt social media platforms
Polarization phenomena in next-gen/alt social media platforms
Ethical and privacy aspects of next-gen/alt social media platforms
Dataset and resources for studying next-gen/alt social media platforms

Dates & Submissions

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:Mar 31, 2025
Notifications: May 1, 2025
Camera-Ready Due: May 8, 2025
Workshop Day: June 23, 2025
Early Registration Deadline: May 9, 2025

All deadlines are 11:59 PM AOE (Anywhere On Earth)

Submission Instructions

Submit via the EasyChair portal: available soon!

We welcome both 2-page abstracts, as well as short (4 pages) papers - not counting references and appendices (if applicable). Abstracts are ideal for position papers or discussion papers of previously published work. Short papers must contain original work, and are best suited for technical contributions, demos, datasets, or early-stage research with experimental results.

All submissions should be double-blind and in English, and have to follow the AAAI two-column, camera-ready style AAAI 2025 Author Kit on Overleaf or AAAI 2025 Author Kit.zip (Word or LaTeX). Submitted papers must adhere to the ICWSM guidelines, but authors do not need to compile the ethics checklist required for submissions to the main research track of ICWSM.

The accepted short papers (not the 2-page abstracts) will be published in the ICWSM Workshop Proceedings (https://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/) by the AAAI Press.

The Next-Gen and Alternative Social Media Workshop is expected to be in person, and we encourage you to attend in person to fully engage with the community. However, we are also planning a virtual option for those who cannot attend in person. More details will be provided soon.

Please, contact the organizers for questions related to the submission or participation.

Program

All times below are Eastern Time (ET)

More information will be available soon.

Registration

Please refer to the ICWSM2025 Conference Website for registration details and instructions.

Data Challenge

The workshop will feature a collaborative task to design and curate data-driven shared resources through the open and free-to-use APIs offered by next-generation and alternative social media platforms. Participants will work together to explore the potential of these APIs, brainstorming, and outlining innovative ways to collect and structure data that can advance research in this field.

Framed as a game-like exercise, this activity will encourage creativity and teamwork as participants practice preliminary data collection and share insights to shape the vision for impactful resources. To this aim, participants will be guided via ready-to-use Python notebooks containing detailed instructions and examples on how to use these APIs.

Beyond the workshop, this collective effort aims to inspire innovative research ideas, foster lasting collaborations, and lay the groundwork for shared data resources that can benefit the broader research community.

Workshop Location

Aalborg University Copenhagen
Denmark

The Next-Gen and Alternative Social Media Workshop will be held in conjuction with the AAAI ICWSM 2025 Conference, whose workshops will be hosted at the Aalborg University Copenhagen.