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The results of the 2018 national elections, together with the socio-demographic heterogeneity of the main social platforms, make it interesting to understand if and how social categories have been mentioned or incorporated into the 2022's national electoral campaign in Italy. This contribution aims to analyze the multi-platform communication of the main political candidates from various coalitions and parties to investigate whether they based their media campaign on specific social categories and issues, and whether this effort had the electoral impact it deserved. Empirical evidence shows that only some candidates have focused their attention on specific social categories without taking into account the diverse audiences of the platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actors in the digital public sphere contribute to the public discourse on health and well-being by producing big data in various ways. User-generated health data are natural digital traces that social networks, wearable devices, health apps, and search engines can generate. The proliferation of usergenerated content impacts the production, circulation, and consumption of health news, ensuring a vibrant public sphere on the topic. In today's world, it is crucial to identify how new health-produced datasets can be used to assess Social Determinants of Health (SDH). SDH includes non-medical factors that influence health outcomes, such as the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age and what shapes the conditions of daily life. Health technologies hold great promise for developing digital health skills and improving health outcomes for patients with chronic diseases. Contemporary societies have undergone an epidemiological transition that has seen infectiouspredominant diseases transform over the years into chronic-degenerative diseases. Social media provides an open forum for communication between individuals, and content creators on TikTok are progressively changing the way audiovisual texts are produced and enjoyed, following a logic that tends towards media convergence and intermediality. This article aims to conceptualize how influencers providing public health information promote knowledge related to the obesity debate. Based on a sample of TikTok videos, we can gather insights and interpretations that help analyze the messages and themes conveyed by social media influencers. This analysis can help us to identify information and dimensions relevant to health advocacy and shed light on the underlying discourses and themes in their content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, artificial intelligence is being applied in areas ranging from public institutions to people's everyday lives. Its pervasiveness makes it a protagonist of essential changes in society. In recent years, sustainable development has moved to the centre of public discourse and national and international planning. The UN defines sustainability as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" and has developed the 2030 Agenda to achieve this objective (UN, 2015). AI's ubiquity and relevance mean it can be either a facilitator or a barrier to sustainable development. In a paper published in Nature, Vinuesa and colleagues (2020) highlighted how AI can facilitate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals but also pose a threat to their attainment. The importance of AI today requires a redefinition of the concept of sustainable development in order to protect areas that have become particularly sensitive to its proliferation. Therefore, reflection on how AI can contribute to achieving sustainable development should be in parallel with how AI redefines the dimensions of sustainable development. The dimensions worthy of attention identified in this work are Transparency, Autonomy, Democracy and Privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: The importance of sport in advancing the roadmap for the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda was reaffirmed at the 7th Summit on Smart Cities and Sport (Lausanne, 26–28 October 2020), where it was emphasized that developing a culture of sustainability among younger generations is crucial. Given this scenario, the present study focuses on two main research questions: "Is there a diffusion of an environmentally oriented culture among university students?" and "Is there a relationship between sports' world and environmentally oriented culture?" (2) Methods: To establish the empirical framework (279 questionnaires received), we used web-based survey techniques with a Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI) procedure. (3) Results: The analysis results show that the sample considers environmental sustainability as a part of a more comprehensive understanding of sustainability, which reflects a sense of fear for uncertainty in the future. The second finding suggests that sport does not play a significant role in shaping awareness. (4) Conclusions: The cultural and generational background must be considered for better understanding of the research results, especially in Italy where it appears that sustainability is not considered a priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of right-wing populists in Western Europe has often been linked to their ability to exploit social media affordances to fuel anger. While scholarship has already examined the emotional dimension of the populist right's online communication, with some researchers studying specifically the fuelling of anger among social media users, we still lack empirical proof of the mobilizational effectiveness of what we describe as "anger-triggering communication." To explore this question, in this article, we develop a statistical and topic analysis of right-wing populists' Facebook pages in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany during the 2019 European Union (EU) election campaign. We find that (a) right-wing populists on Facebook have a significantly higher number of "Angry" Facebook reactions per post compared to their political adversaries; (b) there is a positive and significant effect of the number of Angry reactions on the number of times a post is shared; (c) Angry reactions and Shares are overrepresented in posts on immigration and security, but anger-fuelled mobilization is not limited to these topics. These findings contribute to the scholarship on social media, emotional communication, and populism, adding insights on the mobilizational effectiveness of negative campaigning. The article highlights that stoking public anger, especially around controversial issues such as immigration and security, is a rewarding tactic because it increases motivational strength, and contributes to triggering high-threshold interactions such as sharing, which, in turn, are key for achieving virality in the diffusion of political messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Come votano le periferie. Comportamento elettorale e disagio sociale nelle città Italiane" edited by Marco Valbruzzi examines the electoral behavior of peripheral areas in 13 major urban centers in Italy. The book aims to contribute to the understanding of voting patterns in these areas and provides a common framework for comparing the results across cities. The first part of the book defines the concept of periphery and analyzes the socioeconomic distress index in the suburban areas of the cities. The second part focuses on case studies of the 2008, 2013, and 2018 general elections, highlighting the relationship between distress and voting choices, party dynamics, and abstention. The book concludes by suggesting further research into the electoral behavior of peripheries. [Extracted from the article]

The digital era and the boom of social, user-generated and freely available and usable content on the Net has brought to the fore a classic technique, accused too often of being highly subjective and requiring a large amount of intellectual work. This technique is Content Analysis, which has seen an unprecedented explosion in recent years. In addition to the incessant flow, speed of diffusion and high volume of today's big data, the attention of social researchers - as well as of anyone interested in drawing information from this enormous proliferation of data - is shifting towards new possibilities. Among these we find that of having a notion of the contents conveyed, of the feelings expressed, of the polarities of big data, but also the chance to extract other information that indirectly speaks of the tastes, opinions, beliefs and transformations behind the behavior of the users of the Net. In fact, secondary data available on the Net, collectable through sophisticated query systems with API or with web scraping software, make it possible to accumulate huge amounts of this dense social data, from which it is possible to try to extract not only trends but real knowledge, in a quantitative as well as in a qualitative manner. This enriches the value of the results that can be produced with Content Analysis and limits, until disappearing, all the critical horizons that have classically left this technique in the shadows, allowing it to find new applicative dignity, validity and reliability (Hamad et al. 2016). In order to explain this evidence, the contribution that we will present attempts to prove that the return of Content Analysis techniques is not only due to the change in the scenario and in the data analyzed, but also to the ability of this technique to innovate and evolve, leading to open analytical perspectives beyond contingent changes. This can be demonstrated through the application of digital mixed content analysis to the recent Covid-19 outbreak and its development of the perception of the Italian population on a specific digital social platform, Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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