[AISWorld] CFP: Fake News, Rumors and Other Unintended Consequences of Engagement in Virtual Communities (AMCIS 2018)

[Gerard De Leoz]

CALL FOR PAPERS

24th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) August 16-18, 2018, New Orleans, LA

MINITRACK 5:  Fake News, Rumors, and Other Unintended Consequences of Engagement in Virtual Communities.

In alignment with the Digital Disruption theme of AMCIS 2018, we are pleased to invite submission of completed research papers and research-in-progress papers for this mini-track.  This mini-track is under the Virtual Communities and Collaboration track (http://amcis2018.aisnet.org/?page_id=111#toggle-id-29).

MINITRACK DESCRIPTION:

Virtual communities enabled by social media are providing new opportunities for people to engage with each other. Such engagements span across personal, political, social, or economic spheres. Recently, such engagements have been exploited to spread fake news, rumors, biased reporting, or for promoting unsupported viewpoints. Some other unintended effects include cyberbullying, suppression of alternate viewpoints, or promotion of narratives disconnected from facts. These reflect unintended consequences of engagement in virtual communities that have the potential to significantly influence the discourse of social, political, moral, or economic debate. It cannot be denied that virtual communities hold a lot of potential for beneficial and positive engagement among the community members but there is a need to examine some of these unintended consequences prevalent in virtual communities. The objective of this mini-track is to provide a forum for discussion and presentation of original research highlighting some of these unintended consequences and subsequent challenges/or solutions to deal with them. We seek papers that address nature of unintended consequence of engagements in virtual communities from a theoretical, conceptual, or empirical perspective. Both quantitative and qualitative studies are welcome.

Generally, topics of interest are those that model and analyze the impacts, spread and drivers of unintended consequences, which include, but are not limited to:

*	Models analyzing spread of fake news in virtual communities
*	Models identifying rumors/ fake news 
*	Impact of rumors/fake news on participation in virtual communities 
*	Drivers of rumors/fake news in virtual communities
*	Harassment, intimidation and stalking
*	Damaged reputation due to rumors or gossips
*	Online deception
*	Sex and violence
*	Inadvertent disclosure of private information
*	Changes to relationships between public and private sphere
*	Suppression of alternate viewpoints
*	Promotion of narratives disconnected from facts
*	Data mining in virtual communities with malicious intent
*	Use of personal data by third-parties, hacking and identify theft

IMPORTANT DATES:

January 15, 2018: Manuscript submissions for AMCIS 2018 begins
February 28, 2018: Manuscript submissions for AMCIS 2018 due
April 18, 2018: Authors notified about the disposition of their papers

MINITRACK CHAIRS:

Vikas Jain, University of Tampa, vjain at ut.edu
Vishal Midha, Illinois State University, vmidha at illinoisstate.edu
Gerard De Leoz,  University of Tampa, gdeleoz at ut.edu


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Vikas Jain, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Information and Technology Management
Sykes College of Business, Box O
The University of Tampa
401 W Kennedy Blvd, Tampa, FL 33606
Ph: 813-257-3968
Email: vjain at ut.edu