Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become part of everyday life for many people around the world. They are one of the main channels through which information can spread at lightning speed. Thanks to this fact, people use them for the most disparate reasons, such as sources of information in place of newspapers, to receive emotional or technical support, or to share their ideas and opinions to satisfy their need for sociality.

Since their introduction, people questioned these services because they are affected by several problems. These problems include the preservation of the users’ privacy, fake news diffusion, diffusion of illegal pieces of content, censorship vs. free speech, economic value redistribution, security vs trust, and so on. This workshop aims to partially overcome these problems by setting up a platform for researchers to publish their contributions.

The contributions can point to innovative methods and algorithms for social graph mining, which can help develop more efficient information diffusion techniques; the problem of privacy, and how it can be enforced in these systems is current, and in particular the relation between security, trust and privacy is crucial in the scenario of OSNs; the decentralisation and its impact on the implementation of social services; how Artificial Intelligence techniques that respect the privacy of the users can be implemented; technologies that enable the metaverse.

CCS Concepts: • Information systems → Social networks; • Networks → Online social networks; Trust; • Information systems~Web and social media search; • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing;

Keywords: Social Networks and Media: analysis and mining, Decentralization, Blockchain, AI for Social Media

ACM Reference Format: Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi, and Laura Ricci. 2024. Open Challenges in Online Social Networks (OASIS). In 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT '24), September 10--13, 2024, Poznan, Poland. ACM, New York, NY, USA 2 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675119

The diffusion of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has had a profound effect on the way we interact and a deep impact on society and business. Social Media have helped people communicate, breaking down the geographical barriers that restricted communication. Through social networks, virtual communication, sharing of information, and community participation are possible even among people in uncomfortable conditions. Today, Social Media are one of the main parts of daily life by affecting sociality, but they are also essential channels through which information travels faster than ever. Analysis of OSN can help to foresee events to manage critical scenarios. The rapid growth in popularity has opened new challenging problems which involve numerous fields in computer science. These issues have implications on social graph analysis [5], trust and security [6], etc. Moreover, privacy issues and the usage of mobile devices have opened new research fields in the design of decentralised online social networks, which can be considered one of the most important challenges [1]. Furthermore, the current improvement concerning the study and the proposal of new approaches for Social Networks and Media involves not only complex network analysis, and, in particular, the decentralisation of social services [2, 3], but also the introduction of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual/mixed reality to ferry humankind towards the next generation of Online Social Networks. In particular, the concept of metaverse is playing a crucial role in this new generation of hyperconnected, gamified, and immersive social networking platforms, and as a consequence the introduction of decentralization in social platforms, thanks to blockchain technology, in particular through the Web3 and NFTs, as part of the Metaverse world [4]. The workshop targets researchers, doctoral students, people from industry and other people interested in discussing, reflecting and networking on central themes associated with the development and use of social networks. Papers on both theoretical and design aspects of social networks are welcomed, which describe and evaluate novel design methods and system prototypes. The workshop also welcomes work-in-progress and position papers.

Contributions cover, but are not limited to, the following topic areas:

Social Networks Design and Analysis

Security, Trust, and Privacy in Social Networks and Media

Decentralized Social Networking applications: P2P, Cloud, and Mobile

Blockchain Social Media: analysis and applications

Social Sensing and Sentiment Analysis

Toxicity Detection and Prevention in Social Media

Information diffusion

Incentive systems for OSNs

Metaverse

Virtual/Mixed Reality for the Metaverse

Data Mining for OSNs and Media

Dynamic Network Analysis in OSNs

AI for OSNs and Media

Social Dynamics

Accessibility for the Web and Media

Mobility Data and Analysis for Social Media

Ethics in Social Media Analysis

Barbara Guidi is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2007 and 2011, respectively. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, in 2015. She was a Co-Chair for the conference EAI GoodTechs 2017, and Co-Chair of several workshops. She has been involved in the TPC of several International conferences and workshops. She has been a reviewer for relevant journals, such as IEEE Access, and Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (CCPE). She received three Best Paper Awards: at the International Conference DCNET 2013, at the workshop LSDVE 2017, and at LSDVE 2018. Her research interests include P2P networks, NFTs, Metaverse, Blockchain technology, and Decentralized Online Social Networks.

Andrea Michienzi received his PhD in Computer Science at the Università di Pisa in July 2021 and currently holds an Assistant Professor position at the same university. His main research interests include the dynamics of socio-economic networks, enabling technologies for the metaverse, and the application of the blockchain to social networking platforms.

Laura Ricci received the Ph.D. from the University of Pisa. She is currently a Full Professor at the "Department of Computer Science", "University of Pisa", Italy. Her research interests include distributed systems, peer-to-peer networks, cryptocurrencies and blockchains, and social network analysis. In these fields, she has co-authored 150+ papers published in international journals and conference/workshop proceedings. She has served as a program committee member and chair of several conferences. She has been involved in several research projects and has been the local coordinator of the H2020 European Project "Helios: A context-aware Distributed Networking Framework". She has been a member of the National Committee for the definition of the Italian National Strategy for Blockchain.

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Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi, and Laura Ricci. 2020. A graph-based socioeconomic analysis of steemit. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 8, 2 (2020), 365–376.

Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi, and Laura Ricci. 2020. Steem blockchain: Mining the inner structure of the graph. IEEE Access 8 (2020), 210251–210266.

Junliang Luo, Simone Casale-Brunet, Barbara Guidi, Marco Mattavelli, and Xue Liu. 2023. Unveiling social aggregation in the Decentraland metaverse platform. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good. 419–427.

Andrea Michienzi, Barbara Guidi, Laura Ricci, and Andrea De Salve. 2021. Incremental communication patterns in online social groups. Knowledge and Information Systems 63, 6 (2021), 1339–1364.

Chi Zhang, Jinyuan Sun, Xiaoyan Zhu, and Yuguang Fang. 2010. Privacy and security for online social networks: challenges and opportunities. IEEE network 24, 4 (2010), 13–18.

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HT '24, September 10–13, 2024, Poznan, Poland

© 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0595-3/24/09.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675119