While many studies in the field of environmental communication have focused on exploring the environmental impact of social media, this research paper takes a different turn. It investigates, through a qualitative content analysis, 391 websites that support and provide green hosting services. This study is considered the first in the field that aims to examine in-depth how these green websites tend to communicate their green services. Therefore, its contribution is to enhance the relevant bibliography and present more insights regarding green websites and sustainability. The results showed that most of the websites were trying to highlight the positive impact their services will have on the environment. In addition, many websites tried to educate their consumers concerning sustainable development and make them part of a broader green cultural tradition. Nevertheless, on many websites, green hosting seemed a supplementary factor for choosing the company’s services.

In contemporary world, it is estimated that there are 1,838,596,056 sites across 214,036,874 unique domain names and 7,290,968 web-facing computers. The huge power consumption of these online services has serious consequences regarding the environment. The web-sites, along with the web tools, need electrical power to operate. Thus, environmental problems such as global warming, air pollution, natural resource depletion, and acid rain are worsening. Consequently, this study researched five hundred news web-sites including well-known international news organizations in order to understand if they choose to cover environmental news, if they take action to protect the Earth's habitat by operating through renewable sources, by using the black colour in their graphic design or energy saving mode, and by organizing actions in favour of the environment. The findings of this original research revealed that almost none of the prominent news web-sites of the world seem to care about changing their web-sites in order to become environmentally friendly.

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In the current media world, there is a huge debate about the importance of the visibility of a news website in order to secure its existence. Thus, search engine optimization (SEO) practices have emerged in the news media systems around the world. This study aimed to expand the current literature about the SEO practices by focusing on examining, via the walkthrough method, the ways that news companies allow the users to comment on their online news articles. The comments on the news websites are related to the notions of social influence, information diffusion, and play an essential role as a SEO practice, for instance, by providing content and engagement. The examined sample was collected by the most visited news websites' rankings of alexa.com for a global scale and for the countries Greece and Cyprus. The findings reveal that the news websites throughout the globe use similar features and ways to support the comments of the users. In the meantime, though, a high number of the news websites did not allow the users to use their social media accounts in order to comment the provided news articles, or provided multiple comment platforms. This trend goes against the SEO practices. It is believed that this finding is associated with the difficulty of the news organizations to regulate and protect themselves by the users' comments that promote, in some case harmful rhetoric and polarization.Future Internet 2019, 11, 188 2 of 13 behavior. In the meantime, social influence is related to information diffusion. Many studies in the field have revealed the connections between the social influence and the information diffusion [10][11][12][13][14]. Information diffusion and social influence have become of great importance due to the daily use of social media platforms and the operation of search engines.Additionally, previous studies of social media platforms, such as YouTube, have demonstrated that users with similar cultural and political ideas tend to like or dislike the same cultural products [15]. For instance, Japan was one of the most characteristic examples of a country that became successful in the spread of its culture on a global scale. The anime and the manga cultural products have turned into global products. According to Otmazgin [16], this development allows Japan to have a greater influence on different state and non-state actors throughout the world. The aforementioned description regarding the influence of a country has led Nye [17] to create the theory of "soft power." According to him, "soft power" is the capability of causing individuals to adopt beliefs, results, opinions, etc., without getting paid. For a country, its "soft power" can be its policies and culture.Nowadays, social influence and information diffusion are strongly linked with the World Wide Web, social media platforms, and social participation. For more than twenty years, scholars have tried to explain the role of the new technologies in the participation of the public in crucial events, such as demonstrations and collective actions [18]....

Digital Media organizations had a crucial role on the coverage of the Egyptian 'Arab Spring', but until today the outcomes of the news gathering are debatable in the academic society. This study examines the frames of the English-language websites of Al Jazeera, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and China Daily from 9 to 13 February 2011 because of the termination of Hosni Mubarak's presidency. The sample consists of 92 website articles, which report the Egyptian 'Arab Spring' without considering any video footage in the examined news stories. The particular article examines the frames of each article and categorizes them according to a Knowledge Extraction (KE) tool named 'Open Calais', which is owned by another media organization, Reuters. In this study, China Daily's coverage differs from the former researchers' results regarding the 'Arab Spring' covering. According to the findings, there was a merited coverage on the case of the Egyptian 'Arab Spring' without relying exclusively on the content of the official press agency of the People's Republic of China, Xinhua News Agency, and acted like a western-type news media.