We present SemEval-2026 Task 9, a shared task on online polarization detection, covering 22 languages and comprising over 110K annotated instances. Each data instance is multi-labeled with the presence of polarization, polarization type, and polarization manifestation. Participants were asked to predict labels in three subtasks: (1) detecting the presence of polarization, (2) identifying the type of polarization, and (3) recognizing the polarization manifestation. The three tasks attracted over 1,000 participants worldwide and more than 10k submissions on Codabench. We received final submissions from 67 teams and 69 system description papers. We report the baseline results and analyze the performance of the best-performing systems, highlighting the most common approaches and the most effective methods across different subtasks and languages. The dataset and other resources for this task are publicly available.

Recognizing disinformation is a challenging task for humans and AI systems. News can be false, misleading, or harmful, and its interpretation often depends on the cultural context of the audience. However, existing datasets rarely account for these contextual and cultural differences, as they are typically not designed from the perspective of news consumers. To address this gap, in this paper, we present the Information Disorder (InDor) corpus, a multilingual dataset of news articles in English, Farsi, Italian, and Russian, annotated for information disorder detection and explanation. The corpus was developed through a participatory process involving contributors from diverse cultural and professional backgrounds, who engaged in data collection, annotation, and evaluation of Large Language Model (LLM) performance on the task. Our findings highlight that false and manipulated news manifest differently across cultural settings, and that current LLMs fail to adequately capture this complexity. This underscores the need for culturally aware computational approaches in the study of information disorder.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their reliability and alignment with human expectations remain unresolved challenges. This tutorial introduces the foundations of alignment and provides participants with a conceptual and practical understanding of the field. Core principles such as values, safety, reasoning, and pluralism will be presented through intuitive explanations, worked examples, and case studies. The aim is to equip attendees with the ability to reason about alignment goals, understand how existing methods operate in practice, and critically evaluate their strengths and limitations.