Aim & Scope
We live in an era where people are witnessing floods of data online, generated as a result of performing online activities, mainly social media. Some people publish deceptive or fabricated online stories, posts, and news to attract online users, change their state of mind, or make political or financial gains. It is typically carried out with the help of automatic bots to accelerate fake news dissemination. A multitude of research is going on for tracing the surge of falsehoods through automated fact-checking techniques. The developed solution should be fully automated, accountable, instant, and accurate. It should be able to extract sentences from textual or audio clips, distinguish between facts, opinions, and questions, examine and match the data, and finally yield the results with proper explanations. Therefore, Artificial Intelligence is the best suite solution that is being applied for the verification of the claims made in the published stories or news. Specifically, this process involves using Natural Language Processing (NLP), deep learning algorithms, and other AI tools to find, monitor, and match claims. There is vast potential in AI to control fake news spread on the Internet with the help of automated fact-checking. It involves societal, political, ethical, and financial aspects of society. It is an emerging domain that still requires many improvements in approach, tools, and platforms. This special track aims at providing a platform for academic and industrialist researchers and practitioners to exchange and publish the challenges, latest research trends, and results on fact-checking, fake news, and malware detection in online social networks (OSNs).

The topics relevant to this special issue include but are not limited to:

- Techniques for detecting fake news
- Social media and fake news
- Blockchain for fake news detection
- Characterization of fake news
- Automated fact-checking
- Solutions for fact-checking
- Deep learning techniques for fact-checking
- Challenges in fact-checking using AI
- AI for detecting fake news on Social Media
- Techniques for identifying the source of spread of fake news
- Optimization methods for fact-checking ad fake news detection
- Ethical aspects and social media
- Artificial intelligence and its ethical and legal issues
- AI for automated information retrieval
- Different machine learning techniques for fake news detection and fact-checking
- Limitations of automated information retrieval
- Ethical issues in information retrieval
- Effects of social media on the proliferation of fake news
- Techniques and tools for mitigating viral marketing
- Schemes for secure multimedia data sharing on SNs
- Privacy-preserving co-ownership model for co-owned multimedia data management
- Collaborative privacy management
- Steganalytic software and mechanisms to find hidden information within multimedia data
- Methodologies, techniques, and tools for digital oblivion
- Metadata removal and security
- Malware detection for social networks
- Defense mechanisms against malware propagation in SNSs
- Sybil defense and fake profile detection
- Phishing and spammer detection
- Built-in SNS security solutions
- Profile-cloning detection