The global push toward e-government has raised critical questions about whether digital transformation is equally accessible across demographic groups. While digital literacy has been widely recognised as a key determinant of e-government adoption, the moderating role of gender in this relationship remains insufficiently explored, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where structural inequalities intersect with digital access disparities. This study investigates whether sex significantly moderates the relationship between digital literacy and e-government adoption among Nigerian citizens. A quantitative cross-sectional survey design was employed, with structured questionnaires administered to 369 respondents selected through stratified random sampling in Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria. Digital literacy, e-government adoption, and demographic variables were measured using validated multi-item scales. Data were analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) via SmartPLS, with multi-group analysis (MGA) applied to test the moderating effect of sex across male and female subgroups. Findings confirm that digital literacy exerts a significant positive influence on e-government adoption. However, multi-group analysis reveals that sex significantly moderates this relationship, with digital literacy demonstrating a stronger predictive effect on e-government adoption among male respondents than female respondents, reflecting persistent gendered digital inequalities in the Nigerian context. The study concludes that e-government strategies that overlook gender as a structural variable risk deepening existing digital divides. Policymakers and public administrators must adopt gender-sensitive digital literacy interventions to ensure equitable access to and benefits from e-government platforms in developing countries.

Introduction:
The accelerating digital transformation of the tourism sector, driven by the expansion of digital platforms, data management systems, and artificial intelligence applications, is reshaping labor relations and skill requirements. In this context, the development of leadership, social/communicative, and digital skills has become critical to the sustainability and competitiveness of tourism enterprises. This study examines the role of these skills within the tourism and cultural sectors in Crete, with particular emphasis on the gender dimension.

Methods:
This study is based on quantitative research employing structured questionnaires (including both closed- and open-ended questions) distributed to more than 500 tourism and cultural enterprises across all regional units of Crete. The final sample consisted of 287 enterprises. The analysis focused on employers’ and senior executives’ perceptions of essential leadership competencies, employees’ social/communicative and digital skills, and organizational capacity for adaptation to technological change.

Results:
The findings indicate that effective leadership, combined with the enhancement of digital and communicative skills, constitutes a key factor in strengthening organizational resilience. At the same time, the transition toward increasingly digitalized work environments appears to affect professional opportunities for men and women in distinct ways, potentially reinforcing existing gender disparities.

Conclusions:
Sustainable development in the tourism sector requires empowering leadership models and inclusive strategies for digital skills development. Integrating a gender-sensitive perspective into training policies and organizational development initiatives is essential to prevent the reproduction of inequalities within the broader context of technological transformation.

Growing reliance on digital infrastructures has intensified exposure to cyber threats, yet such risks are not evenly distributed across social groups. Drawing on feminist criminology and digital safety scholarship, this study examines gendered patterns of cyber (in)security in Türkiye by focusing on four dimensions: (1) cyber risk perception, (2) protective behaviors (“cyber hygiene”), (3) cyber-technical literacy, and (4) cyber victimization. The analysis distinguishes harassment-based harms (e.g., cyberbullying, leaking, stalking) from financially motivated attacks (e.g., phishing, ransomware, fraud), in line with research documenting gendered threat landscapes online. Data were collected via an online survey (N=387) administered to adult internet users in Türkiye. Key measures included a cyber risk perception index (endişe_), protective behavior index (onlem_), cyber-technical literacy index (bilgi_*), and a victimization score (scvic). Independent-samples t-tests and MANOVA were applied to assess gender effects. Results revealed significant multivariate differences (Wilks’ Λ=.916, p<.001). Univariate tests indicated that women scored higher on risk perception (p=.030) and slightly higher on protective behaviors, while men reported higher cyber-technical literacy (p=.061, marginal) and significantly higher victimization (p=.018). These asymmetries illustrate how gendered socialization and differential threat exposure shape online safety practices. Findings demonstrate that cyber insecurities are not merely technical phenomena but are embedded in broader socio-cultural structures.

In the era of machine learning-driven predictive systems, data anonymization and perturbation techniques have become widespread for protecting individual and group privacy and simulating rare events. Yet these approaches frequently undermine causal inference, reduce model accuracy, and enlarge predictive gaps—the critical disparity between statistical inferences derived from training data and definitive operational predictions.

This review investigates the inverse relationship between privacy preservation and predictive performance, conceptualizing it as a contemporary value conflict embedded in technicism: over-reliance on technical fixes that unintentionally intensify systematic biases within intelligent automation.

Central research questions include the following: Does privacy protection via data perturbation obstruct models’ direct grasp of human behavioral patterns? What are the downstream effects of predictive gaps on task automation and societal biases? Drawing heavily on Max Weber’s value pluralism, instrumental rationality, and the (iron cage) metaphor—alongside Isaiah Berlin’s insights—the analysis demonstrates how technocratic solutions and unilateral privacy advocacy fail to resolve the inherent tension, reducing a deep value clash to mere technical problems and perpetuating a vicious cycle of increasing complexity.

A hybrid methodology combined horizontal and vertical literature reviews. From Scopus, IEEE, and Google Scholar (2019–2025), 21 sources were selected using keywords “Machine Learning,” “Model Accuracy,” and “Privacy,” then coded in MAXQDA 24 across five categories, revealing four major gaps: insufficient social-science framing, the need for multidimensional assessment, technical–social disconnect, and unexamined sociological privacy–accuracy links.

Findings show that “infrastructural privacy” widens predictive gaps, echoing Weber’s iron cage where rationality traps rather than liberates. Real-world cases (supermarket pregnancy targeting, counterterrorism metadata analysis) highlight privacy violations and error amplification via proxy data. While protective, synthetic data and differential privacy distort genuine causal relations, fostering biases in sensitive automation domains such as policy-making.

The review concludes that meaningful resolution demands explicit value-based trade-offs_neither absolute technicism nor uncompromising privacy absolutism_to curb systematic biases in socio-technical systems.

As media production and distribution increasingly integrate recommender systems, generative AI, and conversational interfaces, gatekeeping shifts from a primarily editorial function to a distributed, continuously optimizing socio-technical process. Building on recent work on AI-enabled gatekeeping, automated content pipelines, and platform governance, this paper advances a conceptual model of AI gatekeeping across media production and couples it with an RL-informed agent perspective to clarify where—and how—societal values are operationalized (or displaced) by optimization objectives. The conceptual model decomposes media gatekeeping into an end-to-end pipeline of decision points that apply beyond journalism to creator economies and platform-native formats: (1) creator and source inclusion (who gets visibility and monetization access), (2) topic/format selection and trend detection, (3) content generation and editing (text, audio, image, video), (4) packaging and metadata (titles, thumbnails, tags, captions), (5) ranking/recommendation and feed placement, (6) moderation and safety filtering, and (7) distribution feedback loops (engagement, retention, and revenue signals). Each stage is specified in terms of actors (creators, studios, newsrooms, platforms, vendors), artifacts (training data, prompts, style guides, policies), and outcomes (visibility, framing, attention allocation, and cultural salience). The RL-informed perspective treats AI-mediated media gatekeeping as sequential decision-making under constraints, where agents learn policies that trade off timeliness, quality, novelty, audience satisfaction, and harm minimization. This framing makes explicit a core societal risk: when reward signals are proxied by engagement and watch-time, systems can rationally learn behaviors that amplify outrage, optimize for addictive consumption patterns, privilege already-dominant aesthetics, or systematically under-expose minority creators and niche cultural topics—often without any single decision appearing normatively problematic in isolation. The paper proposes evaluation dimensions aligned with social-science concerns—exposure equity, plurality of cultural representation, provenance and disclosure, and user contestability—paired with RL-relevant diagnostics (reward specification audits, off-policy evaluation, counterfactual exposure tests, and drift monitoring).

Domestic violence is usually viewed as a crime and a civil cause of action committed against a woman, but men are also victims of violence in the domestic and marriage relations. Violence against men, physical, psychological, emotional and economic is a subject that has been largely ignored in Indian society. The current law system in India is mainly aimed for the protection of women in the form of legislations as the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 and the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 that have laid out the remedies to the female victims. As a result, male victims of domestic violence are usually impeded in accessing justice and protection by legal, social, and psychological means. Many fundamental rights in the Constitution of India include equality before the law, protection of life and personal liberty, and the right to life with dignity. Such constitutional guarantees are supposed to be offered equally to all persons irrespective of gender. Nevertheless, the lack of gender-neutral legislation on domestic violence is a cause of the concern about the safeguarding of human rights of men in India. This study critically focuses the legal context of domestic violence in India and determine whether it provides sufficient protection of the human rights of male victims. The research also emphasizes the social stigma, culture, and institutional issues that deny men the chance to report domestic abuse. The methodology of the research is the doctrinal and analytical approach. The research provides the legal challenges and human rights considerations of domestic violence against men and contributes in advancing the current and new perspective of gender-neutral laws.

Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly used in editorial work, bringing significant benefits and new creative opportunities. However, they also raise ethical and professional challenges that require careful consideration. This research investigates the ethical risks associated with the use of AI in the Romanian media system, focusing on phenomena such as algorithmic bias, misinformation, disinformation amplification, and transparency. The analysis also addresses the risk of diminishing human editorial control and the trend toward content standardization.
The research methodology is qualitative, involving 15 semi-structured interviews with media professionals in Romania (10 experienced journalists and 5 editors-in-chief). The results highlight an ambivalent position towards AI integration. Although respondents recognise the operational advantages of automation in optimising workflows, they express consistent concerns about ethical vulnerabilities, reduced editorial responsibility, and the potential amplification of structural dysfunctions already existing in the Romanian media landscape.
Participants co-explain the need to adopt clear ethical codes for the use of AI in newsrooms, as well as coherent, enforceable legal regulations. In the absence of such mechanisms, the uncontrolled integration of AI risks accentuating superficiality, commercial pressures, and the dilution of professional standards. This study advocates a hybrid working model in which AI serves as a tool to complement journalistic practice, without substituting for professional judgment or compromising public trust.

Introduction: Online discussions about nutrition unfold across heterogeneous digital communities that extend beyond explicitly health-focused forums and spaces. Yet, it remains unclear how nutrition-related discourse is distributed across broader social domains and whether its thematic embedding reflects the Social Determinants of Health (SDH) framework. To address this question, we systematically mapped Reddit communities using a taxonomy derived from Wikipedia’s curated content categories.

Methods: Approximately 60,000 subreddits were classified into thematic domains, derived from Wikipedia’s curated content taxonomy using large language models (LLMs) with enforced structured outputs. Nutrition-related subreddits were then identified and aligned with SDH domains, using an LLM-assisted approach followed by manual verification. To examine how nutrition discourse is distributed across social contexts at the community level, we conducted analyses using two complementary perspectives: an unweighted approach capturing community diversity and an activity-weighted approach capturing discourse intensity.

Results: In the unweighted analysis, 65% of nutrition-related subreddits were classified under health care access and quality, while 35% were distributed across non-health SDH domains, including lifestyle and individual behavior (24%), economic stability (6%), social and community context (3%), and education access and quality (1.5%). However, the activity-weighted analysis revealed a clear distributional asymmetry: although health-oriented communities are more numerous, discourse intensity is disproportionately concentrated in lifestyle-centered spaces. Specifically, while lifestyle- and individual behavior-focused communities represent only 24% of nutrition-related subreddits, they generate 40% of total nutrition-related activity, compared with 47% generated by health care-focused communities.

Conclusions: A clear distributional asymmetry in online nutrition discourse was revealed in this study. Our findings demonstrate that digital nutrition communication is not confined to formal health contexts but is embedded within broader social domains central to the Social Determinants of Health framework. Methodologically, the study illustrates the value of LLM-assisted taxonomy mapping for large-scale, domain-level analysis in computational social science.

Historically, children have been recognized as central to social work practice: vulnerable yet powerful levers of social change. Yet adult, institutional, and policy lenses often silence their experiences. Globally, child-centered practice has shifted from charity and welfare models toward rights- and strengths-based frameworks that recognize children as capable social actors who bear agency and voice. Despite this evolution, many children in contexts of poverty, migration, and informal urban settlements remain excluded from state protections and basic services.

This study examines how a non-state actor, the Children of the World India Trust (CWIT), operationalizes child-centered practice in the Sai Nagar and Sambhaji Nagar settlements of Navi Mumbai. Adopting a bottom-up, qualitative case-study design, the research draws on a year-long field immersion through participant observation, reflective field notes, and informal interviews with children, parents, and staff. Data were thematically analyzed across education, nutrition, and holistic development, and framed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and ecological perspectives on development.

Findings show that CWIT functions as a stabilizing microsystem within children’s everyday ecologies, proving crucial and transformative in children's lives through consistent care, participation-based learning, and resilience-building engagement. Interventions focused on building literacy and education for all emerged as empowering, nutrition catering to children’s basic needs, and structured recreation and co-curricular activities as fostering a sense of self-expression. These actions create a ripple effect, extending beyond the child to their families and communities, promoting overall changes in parental mindsets and the community’s approach.

The study argues for reframing child-centered social work from an abstract ideal to a practice of everyday relationships and systems-level scaffolding. To strengthen child welfare in underserved urban contexts, policy and practice must center children’s voices, enable participation, and support NGOs that translate rights-based theory into sustained, context-responsive action, positioning children as co-authors of their development.

This study explores the impact of social media networks on the maintenance of romantic relationships among undergraduate students at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka. Within a digitalized social space shaped by modernity, interpersonal relationships face unique challenges. Factors such as personal busyness and digital communication often lead individuals toward virtual relationships. As connectivity is increasingly interpreted as a core characteristic of intimacy, people resort to virtual spaces to fulfill their social needs. Adopting a qualitative approach, this study gained an in-depth understanding of student experiences through semi-structured interviews with 30 selected participants at the University of Ruhuna. The data collected was analyzed using thematic analysis to identify digital behavior patterns. The findings reveal that while technology has simplified communication, it has simultaneously fostered digital jealousy and suspicion among romantic partners. Constant digital socialization often undermines mutual trust, leading to conflicts within relationships. A significant observation is that although technology facilitates connectivity, it tends to diminish emotional security. The study concludes that maintaining relationships through digital methods in the modern era has become more challenging compared to traditional romantic dynamics. This shift profoundly impacts the formation and sustainability of social institutions. Therefore, in the digital age, enhancing individuals' “Mental literacy”, which refers to an individual's capacity to critically and rationally navigate the events occurring within their digital environment while simultaneously possessing the ability to mitigate the resulting psychological distress, is crucial for maintaining healthy and sustainable relationships.