In the treatment of obesity, social support is considered key to successful weight loss and behavioural change, and online health communities to complement obesity treatment programmes have been shown to increase obesity treatment effectiveness. This study reviews the latest literature regarding how social support provided through an online health community can help people tackle obesity, identifying the different effects of social support on online health community members, specifically, the promotion of behavioural change and increased self-efficacy. This study also reveals how the recent literature points to both a direct and indirect relationship between social support in online health communities for obesity treatment and actual weight loss. This review is likely to provide useful insights to both healthcare professionals and social platform developers.

Political communication in social media is a vital element in any modern electoral campaign. In the early days, the use of any social network or even a website was the norm, however, nowadays, all candidates participating in an election must be present in Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For this reason, the aim of this research is to analyze the impact of the main political leaders that ran for the presidency of the regional government of Madrid in these three major social media. To do so, a quantitative methodology, based in massive data collection is used, allowing for a precise approach to the impact of every candidate account in the studied social media platforms. As an initial conclusion, it can be highlighted that, even if Twitter is the preferred social media platform by politicians, Instagram is the one favorite by users.

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Social networks offer excellent opportunities for healthcare organizations to disseminate information and communicate with individuals during a health crisis, since they can influence health-related decisions and perspectives. In this paper we compare strategies carried out by the Spanish government and the autonomous community authorities on several social networks (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). In spite of offering two-way communications, actual use of such platforms was one-way. In addition, some agencies did not have profiles on these platforms; in fact, two agenices were not present on Instagram, the platform with the youngest users. Finally, there was an increasing use of images on social network postings. Results demonstrate that in times of health crisis, some governmental agencies employ social networks mainly as a tool to disseminate information.