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Crises were highly relevant in the 2022 Italian general election. The label of "crisis" was associated with multiple policy issues, ranging from the environment and health to foreign policy. Previous studies have extensively discussed the impact of crises on voter behavior, demonstrating that voters are particularly concerned with parties' valence attributes, such as the effectiveness of policies and leaders' ability to resolve emergencies. However, limited attention has been paid to assessing how parties mobilize the crisis paradigm on social media. This study seeks to bridge this gap by analyzing the impact of crisis-related content on Facebook user engagement, with a special focus on distinguishing the relative effectiveness of populist versus mainstream parties in deploying such narratives. Moreover, this research explores how the intertwining of crisis narratives with portrayals of party responsibility or irresponsibility influences the virality of social media posts. To answer these questions, we manually coded 4,827 election campaign posts to create an original dataset. The evidence shows that crises have an impact on boosting user engagement, although this effect seems to be limited to populist parties. The results also suggest that irresponsible claims cease to be rewarding during a crisis. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the strategic use of crisis narratives by political parties on digital platforms and underscores the complex interplay between crisis communication and public engagement in the contemporary political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how parties spread news from traditional media on their social network accounts to engage followers. In particular, we address why parties would choose to include in the 'media digest' they carefully craft for their followers also content from 'hostile' media outlets and journalists. We analyze 4,586 Facebook posts published by the main Italian parties during the 2019 European election campaign, assessing the impact on readers' engagement of counter-attitudinal and pro-attitudinal content from either hostile or friendly media. Our results show that parties skillfully exploit friendly and hostile sources alike to alternatively engage or outrage their followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament campaign, we investigate parties' engagement in negative campaigning on Facebook and the relationship to a parties' ideology and their status as governing versus opposition party at the national level. Manual coding of 8,153 Facebook posts of parties from twelve European countries shows parties create less negative posts than positive and neutral ones. However, these negative posts attract more shares than positive, neutral, and balanced statements, which increases their prominence on the platform. Hence, users and algorithms create a negative campaign environment on Facebook to a greater extent than parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strain burst hazard is one of the main challenges that faces deep underground environments. To manage it, it is needed to assess its probability occurrence (or potential). Various methods have been proposed over the years to assess the phenomenon early on. However, due to uncertainties in rock mass properties and the physical processes of the phenomenon, mitigation measures are an additional important line of defense to ensure workplace safety. While work has been carried out to assess the rockburst hazard better and improve support systems, the effect of mitigation measures on strain burst hazard potential is unclear. This paper studies the influence of the implementation of shotcrete and rockbolts support and destress blasting in tunnels on strain burst potential, based on two-dimensional numerical models of circular tunnels. The results highlight that, as expected, the use of mitigation measures allows the strain burst occurrence to decrease. However, the strain burst hazard level does not decrease easily, even when using mitigation measures. In the case of serious overbreak hazards, only a combination of system support and destress blasting seems to have an impact on these events, and not for all the simulated cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]