Digital Minds
Assessing the interplay of social media on mental health
1st Edition
@ the 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)
May 26th, 2026. Los Angeles, CA, USA
Social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are deeply embedded in everyday life. While they enable connection, creativity, and peer support, they are also increasingly associated with anxiety, depression, body image concerns, and exposure to harmful content—especially among minors.
Public debate often frames social media as either “good” or “bad” for mental health. However, the reality is more complex. Platform design, recommender systems, moderation policies, and user behaviors interact in ways that can produce both harmful and supportive outcomes. Engagement-driven algorithms may amplify emotionally intense content and create feedback loops, yet the same systems can also connect vulnerable individuals to communities of care and recovery.
The Digital Minds workshop at AAAI ICWSM 2026 aims to move beyond correlational evidence and simplistic narratives. Our goal is to understand the mechanisms linking online social media environments and mental health, and to explore how computational methods can help uncover risks while strengthening supportive dynamics.
We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from computational social science, psychology, sociology, human-centered AI, and related fields.
The workshop focuses on two complementary perspectives:
-
Online Social Media as a Tool to Study Mental Health
Leveraging digital traces, online discourse, and behavioral signals to assess mental health conditions and well-being at scale. -
Online Social Media as a Factor Shaping Mental Health
Examining its dual role as a supportive environment (peer support, help-seeking, stigma reduction) and as a potential source of harm (anxiety, depression, exposure to harmful content).
Special emphasis will be placed on:
- The impact of social media on minors’ mental health
- The role of recommender systems and platform design
Topics of Interest
We invite original contributions at the intersection of computational methods and mental health research, including but not limited to:
- NLP and machine learning methods to detect mental health signals
- Modeling psychological effects of social media, especially for vulnerable users
- Auditing recommender systems and content moderation mechanisms
- Analysis of online mental health communities and peer support dynamics
- Design and evaluation of platform-level interventions
- Dataset creation and benchmarking for mental health research
- Causal inference and experimental approaches in online environments
- Ethical, privacy, and governance challenges
The Digital Minds workshop aims to:
Advance Data-Driven Mental Health Research
Promote robust, scalable, and ethically grounded approaches to studying mental health using online data.
Examine the Dual Role of Platforms
Investigate how social media environments function both as support systems and as risk factors.
Assess Algorithmic and Design Impacts
Analyze how personalization, engagement optimization, and moderation shape psychological outcomes.
Bridge Disciplines and Methods
Foster collaboration across computational and social sciences to develop interpretable and actionable insights.
Paper submission: April 1, 2026
Author notification: April 15, 2026
Camera-Ready: TBD
