Important Dates

Submission due: TBA, 2026 23:59 Anywhere on Earth

ARR reviewed submission due: TBA, 2026

Notification of acceptance: TBA, 2026

Camera-ready papers due: TBA, 2026

Workshop: 24-29 October, 2026

Overview

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 tenth edition of WOAH, which will be Ten Years of WOAH: Reflecting on Progress and New Frontiers. We aim to reflect on a decade of research on online harms by examining how these phenomena—and the technologies that shape them—have evolved over time. While early work focused primarily on textual hate speech and harassment, the landscape has expanded to include a broader range of harms such as radicalisation, child sexual exploitation, gender-based abuse, misinformation, and algorithmic bias. At the same time, advances in AI, multimodal platforms, and large-scale recommendation systems have transformed how harmful content is produced, amplified, and experienced online. These shifts raise new questions about how harms should be defined, measured, and addressed across languages, cultures, and modalities. To support this reflection, we invite NLP researchers, social scientists, legal and policy scholars, and practitioners to engage with key challenges emerging after ten years of WOAH. These include the conceptualisation and measurement of harm, the limitations of current datasets and models, the role of platforms and algorithms in shaping online environments, and the need for more inclusive, multilingual, and interdisciplinary approaches. By fostering dialogue across disciplines, our goal is to assess progress made over the past decade, identify persistent gaps, and help set priorities for the next generation of research on online harms.

Submission

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system.

Submission link: TBA

The workshop will accept three types of papers.

Academic Papers (long and short): Long papers of up to 8 pages, excluding references, and short papers of up to 4 pages, excluding references. Unlimited pages for references and appendices. Accepted papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer comments. Previously published papers cannot be accepted.
Non-Archival Submissions: Up to 2 pages, excluding references, to summarise and showcase in-progress work and work published elsewhere.
Civil Society Reports: Non-archival submissions, with a minimum of 2 pages and no upper limit. Can include work published elsewhere.

ARR reviewed submission link: TBA

Format and styling

All submissions must use the official ACL two-column format, using the supplied official style files. The templates can be downloaded in Style Files and Formatting. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. All submissions should adhere to the workshop policies.

All submissions, except for civil society reports, must be fully anonymised. Self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”.

Following the ACL 2023 guidelines, we believe that it is also important to discuss the limitations of your work, in addition to its strengths. The “Limitations” section will appear at the end of the paper, after the discussion/conclusions section and before the references, and will not count towards the page limit.

Authorship

The author list for submissions must include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. No changes to the order or composition of authorship may be made after the paper submission deadline. Submissions will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. We have included a conflict of interest section in the submission form. When submitting, you should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

Anonymity Period

We are not enforcing any anonymity period.

Multiple Submissions Policy

The workshop allows for multiple submissions. Work that has been presented, or will be presented, at other venues may also be submitted as non-archival. This includes work that will be presented at the EMNLP 2026 main conference, or is accepted in Findings of EMNLP.

Contact Info

Please send any questions about the workshop to organizers@workshopononlineabuse.com