Exchanging personal data and disclosing one's self to others on the Internet is an integral part of everyday life for many users. Social media especially provides many opportunities for exchanging and sharing personal and sometimes even intimate data. Increasingly, users also exchange health information (e.g., concerning physical fitness or even diseases) with other users and institutions, which can bring several positive but also negative outcomes. Advantages of online health information exchange can involve receiving information, social support, or diagnoses independent of time and location. Disadvantages occur if users' privacy is threatened. Users might feel uncomfortable when their private data are not treated confidentially by other users or third parties, which might lead to negative emotions, decreased intention of using online healthcare services in the future, or even serious privacy breaches. Users' willingness to share personal health‐related information via Internet‐based systems depends on the expected positive and negative outcomes related to contextual (e.g., platform) and personal (e.g., concerns) factors. Since health information contains sensitive data, the willingness to exchange such data is always related to users' experienced and actual level of privacy. Analyzing the processes of online health information exchange against the background of users' privacy is valuable for the understanding of users' needs and provides a foundation for improving online healthcare services.

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Social media platforms provide opportunities for users across the world to connect and communicate between them and engage into acts of social support and entertainment. Yet it can also bring negative consequences as it has been associated with poor mental health and life dissatisfaction. This underlines the importance of delivering social media literacy (SML) interventions that raise awareness of the dangers and threats that are hidden within. To this date, SML initiatives have shown their benefits towards the acquisition of SML skills through the forms of school interventions and mini-games. However, studies on promoting SML through social media platforms need to be also encouraged and innovative approaches to provide interactive scenarios with hands-on experiences need to be formulated. Hence, the project COURAGE introduces a new approach towards SML by proposing the integration of educational opportunities within a controlled social media platform. To provide students the opportunity to learn whilst they naturally explore social media we propose the integration of virtual learning companions. In this paper we report seven empirical approaches towards SML skills acquisition powered by virtual learning companions. The paper concludes with a discussion towards the benefits and limitations of using this type of SML interventions.

Social media are offering new opportunities for communication and interaction way beyond what was possible only a few years ago. However, social media are also virtual spaces where young people are exposed to a variety of threats. Digital addiction, discrimination, hate speech, misinformation, polarization as well as manipulative influences of algorithms, body stereotyping, and cyberbullying are examples of challenges that find fertile ground on social media. Educators and students are not adequately prepared to face these challenges. To this aim, the COURAGE project, presented in this paper, introduces new tools and learning methodologies that can be adopted within higher education learning paths to train educators to deal with social media threats. The overarching principles of the COURAGE project leverage the most recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and in the educational domain paired with social and media psychological insights to support the development of the COURAGE ecosystem. The results of the experiments currently implemented with teachers and students of secondary schools as well as the impact of the COURAGE project on societal changes and ethical questions are presented and discussed.