2Well beyond an analysis reduced to the practices of researchers and their ethics, work on ethics from the vantage point of information and communication sciences (SIC) cannot avoid taking into account the logic of actors and their productions, the discursive as well as the socio-economic, cultural, political and regulatory realities of digital and communication practices (Laurence Balicco, EvelyneBroudoux, Ghislaine Chartron, Viviane Clavier and Isabelle Paillart, 2018). Faced with a generalization of social controversies, whether linked to the health crisis, the environmental crisis, public health issues, or others, it seems essential today that researchers in SIC take part in public debates around ethics and are preparing for those on future issues.

3The objective of this issue is to broadly question ethics from the point of vue of SIC in a digital context. Although questions on ethical issues do not date from the contemporary digital era, this special issue proposes to emphasize the specificities related to digital communication. It is also based on three positions that run through the entire issue:

4Ethics under the prism of information and communication. The ethical questions put forward by digital technology cut across society as a whole. In recent years, many organizations (including the French National Pilot Committee for Digital Ethics) have questioned digital ethics, based on the respect for the human person. In this approach, ethics is not simply a necessity but it also stems from a desire to regulate digital practices, to develop a critical approach and a dialogue aimed at questioning certain fundamental principles of research. These questions all fall within the field of SIC. Yet, what is digital ethics? What ethical questions does “the digital” raise from the point of view of information and human communication?

5Ethics as situated practice. Ethics is neither of a legal nature nor an expertise, but a form of questioning on concrete problematic situations arising in action, below the legal or regulatory frameworks, most notably when logics of contradictory values are at stake. According to the approach of situated ethics, ethics is first of all a questioning exercised in reference to a system of values such as social justice, responsibility, etc. This approach, based on the pragmatism of Dewey (1908), promotes ethics that does not separate values from facts, insofar as it is the value itself constructed by experience that is constitutive of norms and social facts. Research Ethics Committees (CER) are still poorly equipped to consider the social issues of research protocols in the social sciences. Indeed, the regulations taken into account in the French CERs concern (1) the questions of compliance with the GDPR and (2) a conception of human integrity as defined by the loi Jardé (RIPH 1 2 3) relating to research “interventions on the human person”. The question of ethical social issues is classified by extension in the “RIPH3” bringing together “non-interventional research which is research that certainly involves the human person but which does not involve any risk or constraint and in which all the acts are practiced in a usual way” and whose examination focuses on so-called “sensitive” publics (minors, pregnant women, disabled people, etc.). A reflection on the social and ethical issues of research practices and protocols could help to highlight this lack of reflection on protocols for evaluating the ethical issues of research, initially designed for research in the life sciences, and whose field of application has gradually been extended to the social sciences. Thus, starting from fieldwork, from experiments, it will be necessary to establish an ethical questioning on research practices, on professional practices, on digital uses and more broadly on their inclusion in society. If ethics precedes law, what does ethics proceed from? How is it constructed, and how does it become molded into standards, or even legal regulations in the case of the GDPR?

6Ethics under the international lens. Although a universal principle, the understandings of ethics and its implementation depend on situated, localized contexts, which are also culturally and socially diverse when the gaze is international (franzke et al., 2020). A comparison of the approaches of international scientific communities, primarily in the field of communication and digital technology, turns out to be very fruitful. What issues are highlighted by the documents and by established practices? How do they contribute to the effort of researchers to situate themselves or even legitimize themselves in relation to social demands, themselves largely dependent on a given socio-historical context and even on democratic and socio-economic models of the research? By what mechanisms does the research community organize its deliberations and decision-making? To what extent are collective ethical approaches intertwined with political configurations and power issues, in particular by providing an additional tool for the supervision of the profession of researchers, in turn provoking resistance? We introduce this issue with an exchange (in English) with Lars Rinsdorf, former president of the German association DGPuK, equivalent to our SFSIC, who will share with us his view on the discussions around ethics in communication sciences in the German community.

7Shedding light on these three positions, this special issue is structured around two complementary lines of questioning: the transformations of research objects and issues related to ethics, induced by the development of digital technology as well as various feedback from experiments questioning in a new and refreshing way the ethics of research, whether from an epistemological or methodological angle, around data, corpuses, observables, etc. It seems to us that the structure of this issue is symptomatic of a state of ethical questioning in SIC, which largely remains to be constructed. It currently gives rise to general questions related to the digitization of society and questions researchers in SIC about their research ethics practices. We will open our reflection on two other axes which remain to be explored more deeply, one concerning the professional practices in the professions linked to information-communication and the second, closely linked to the observation of the relative maturity of the question, relating to the necessary training to ethical questions from CIS in a digital context.

Questioning ethics in SIC: new objects, new issues?

8This first axis focuses on the new issues raised by digital technology. The digitization of society has led to an turmoil in relations to information and communication, thus bringing about social transformations at all levels. The new objects produced by digital technology (data, algorithms, platforms, etc.), by inserting themselves into all information and communication practices, have generated innovations and uses making it possible to create new knowledge, to connect and to share. They have also revealed new phenomena such as algorithmic biases, the automation of processes with artificial intelligence, or even the viral circulation of fake news. Of course, in the digital context, many ethical questions update a ‘legacy’ reflection on the regulation of the conditions of access, production and circulation of knowledge, but also on the construction of the methods of debate and deliberation which put in tension the desire to disseminate knowledge and media standards in a context of platformization of the economy by GAFAM (see for example, the controversy surrounding the closure of ex-President Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in January 2021). Under these conditions, how can we access the “black boxes” of digital interfaces to bring to light the sociotechnical, cultural, economic and political logics at work in the management of information and communication practices, in the production of algorithms, in the production content and the dynamics of its circulation? What role can the law play in regulating knowledge? What legitimacy do mainstream media have to take on this role as regulator? Which rules underlie the decisions taken by media editors to control information by fact checking? How can they support the controversies necessary for the emergence of consensus? What editorial processes and what paradigms of quantification underlie media publications? Similarly, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Calabrese, Pérez Lagos, 2022) highlighted, how can designers use content to generate traffic? This question of course also arises from the point of research in terms of scientific publication, its formats and the visibility associated with it, which is shown quite clearly by the controversies around science in the making concerning the COVID pandemic.

9More broadly in contemporary societies, digital devices have generated unprecedented possibilities for capturing and tracing data which necessarily raise legal issues of protection of personal data, but also question the anthropological consequences concerning the protection of the human person, in particular the effects of digital technology on attention, behavior and individual and collective decisions and the effects produced by information and communication devices on the behavior of individuals. What impact does automation have on decision making? What roles do applications such as Stop Covid, presented as solutions but also apprehended in the discourse as part of a certain digital solutionism (Morozov, 2014) in the face of the COVID pandemic, play in the social acceptability of public policies?

10Ethical controversies often appear in the face of dilemmas, borderline cases, which call into question ethics’ borders and re-question its principles and its scope, through continuous updating. How does it fit into the digital world through the practices of researchers, professionals and citizens? What form does it take: deontologies, codes of ethics, including in the development of legal translations of these objects? Faced with algorithmic logics, new digital devices and applications (Balbo et al., 2018), what are the contributions of SIC to renewed ethical reflection, particularly concerning the development of research questions and the production of knowledge on communicational and informational practices?

11In this dossier, four articles have been selected to offer answers to this series of questions. The article by Manuel Zacklad and Antoinette Rouvroy, on the ethics of AI and its controversies, makes it possible to advance in the reflection on the ethics of AI. The authors offer an original approach with the help of situated ethics and develop six relevant areas of controversies. Distinguishing themselves from an ethics of technology or external ethics, which separates the question of values from those of facts and aims to reduce the impacts of technologies without calling into question their presuppositions, the authors position the approach of an ethics located in the perspective of Dewey’s work. They underline the importance of taking into account the participation of actors, constituted as publics, in the very definition of the problems to be dealt with. Their reflection leads to the analysis of six areas of controversy in digital ethics and connectionist AI:

1. Controversies related to the issues of digital culture and beliefs related to the autonomy of AI and the objectivity of data;

2. Controversy relating to the impacts on employment and the associated societal transformations;

3. Controversies related to work and methods of work organization;

4. Controversies related to citizenship, diversity, equal opportunity and transparency;

5. Controversies related to the methods of participation of users (and non-users) in the technical choices that concern them;

6. Controversies linked to digital carbon neutrality and territorial development.

12A similar approach of situated ethics is proposed by Thomas Hoang, Sandra Mellot and Magali Prodhomme in order to question the relationship between ecology and digital technology. In their article “The digital questioned by the situated ethics of political ecologies” (Le numérique questionné par l’éthique située des écologies politiques) , the authors shed light on the emergence of digital ecological questions in the French public sphere. Considering the concept of “ecological paradigm”, as “on the one hand, the ecological dimension to which the digital is now subjected; on the other, the SIC approach apprehended as an epistemology of an ecological nature”, they analyze the construction of an ethics of digital ecology in two differentiated spaces, the media and the arts. This original approach makes it possible to grasp the contemporary ecological value which is a floating object, in the process of stabilization. Above all, it makes it possible to highlight the ecological paradigm of digital mediation operated by SIC through the contribution of the communicational and philosophical concept of the “ecological hypergood” and the sociodiscursive analysis of mediatization devices. Thus, this analysis shows the possibility of thinking jointly about ethics, digital technology and ecology in a gradual approach towards ecological value and digital use. This examination of the social issues of mediation, media coverage and remediation of digital ecological issues, attentive to the diversity of points of view, highlights the existence of different ways of understanding and defining ethics.

13Strongly rooted in recent research on the promotion and implementation of open science (OS), the article by Joachim Schöpfel and Otmane Azeroual focuses on “Research information systems: a new object of ethical questioning” (Les systèmes d’information recherche : un nouvel objet du questionnement éthique). Research information systems (IS) are devices (database and/or decision support tools) producing indicators and evaluations for research management. The analysis of these research IS raises ethical issues of research (transparency, openness, integrity), directly linked to the criteria and procedures for the evaluation of research. The state of the art mobilized by the authors takes into account work on the ethical questions posed by these digital devices, from the disciplinary fields of SIC, ethics, information science and technology and communication (STIC) and science and technology studies (STS) to support ethics applied to IS research. The article also presents the results of a survey of developers, project managers and users of these research IS, around two aspects: ethics as the object of the data model of these systems (metrics), and the ethics of setting up and using these systems. It opens around a few perspectives concerning the future development of research IS and their essential support by the SIC and STIC communities.

14Alexandre Sbabo’s article sheds a different light by analyzing the interactions between ethics and identity in a digital environment through a “semio-enunciative” approach. The article explores how interactions with the digital environment hinge on issues concerning the identity of subjects and economic logics. The author explores this vast subject by relying on semiology to show with simple examples how the use of digital devices changes interactional approaches and at the same time creates an ethical problem that he connects to the notion of trust. He insists in particular on the difference between ethics and morality by adopting the point of view of Ricœur (1990) and the importance of the process of “co-enunciation” which conditions the erasure of the identity of the user and by the same token raises the question of trust in a digital device where the “laws of the market” predominate. Firstly, these devices provide greater potential interactivity in practices and uses. By using a “semio-enunciative” approach, Alexandre Sbabo explores two types of interactions that pose ethical problems, the one between researcher and respondent mediated by digital media and the one between human and machine. Situating these contexts under the banner of co-enunciation and problematizing the distinction between deontology and morality, the author explores particular issues of “the establishment of the complex subject” which challenges a definition of ethics linked to the individual.

15The second set of contributions to this issue adopts a reflective stance. The contributions examine ethics with regard to feedback, that is to say its role in methodological choices, the construction of the research problem, the scope of the field studied, as well as the collection and storage of data.

Research ethics and feedback: epistemology, methodology, data, corpus, observables

16Research ethics has a very rich legal framework, in the field of GDPR and bioethics research, however research on and with digital technology renews epistemological and methodological questions, in particular with regard to ethical issues in the choice of theoretical approaches, methods, methods of collecting, processing and visualizing data, as well as their conservation, anonymization and openness (permanent storage, open access, open data, etc.). To this end, we propose to examine feedback from experience that addresses the questions and choices of researchers before, during and after the implementation of the research protocol. Far from an idealization of the confrontation on the ground, it is a question of accounting for the solutions, the constraints, the difficulties, the limits inherent in the confrontation on the ground. Thus, upstream of research, the choice of theories, methods, postures and definition of the protocol requires consideration of ethical issues, whether the research is funded or not. For example, when collecting data, ethical issues can lead to choices being made that can redirect research if the question of consent is correctly posed (Latzko-Toth and Pastinelli, 2013).

18In a more reflexive analysis of scientific publication, what are the frictions that question the ethics of research? Do the new digital dissemination tools not risk conditioning scientific production to follow visibility injunctions borrowed from marketing? How to reconcile the professional strategies of researchers and the performance injunctions of the market economy? How are the - sometimes alternative - metrics of research evaluation constructed? Do they introduce ethical bias? Indeed, researchers can adopt a distancing perspective in order to have their results validated by the community of peers. How to take into account the reception by the public (object of the research) of this distancing inherent in the work of validation of the results by peers? Does the publication also require the involvement of the public concerned by the same research?

19In this issue, four articles have been selected to offer a diversified set of feedback from field experience, whether in terms of the diversity of the platforms addressed or the levels of sensitivity in the field. In their article on “The Invisible Ethical Work on Digital Platforms” (Le travail éthique invisible sur les plateformes numériques) Camille Alloing and Mariannig Le Béchec rely on the analysis of data collected from several types of digital platforms, one dedicated to crowdfunding, and from socio-digital networks. They explain how their reflections led them to change not only their methods - going so far as to build their own extraction software rather than resorting to the platforms’ APIs so as not to be subject to their “observation windows” - but also to change certain aspects of their research. They summarize their three main ethical concerns: the anonymization of the data collected, the management of (lack of) informed consent and the adaptation of research practices to the context. For example, in the project mentioned, they finally chose to deliberately eliminate certain socio-demographic variables of the people whose messages and publications were collected to carry out a real anonymization, in order to prevent lifting anonymity by cross-referencing data. They evoke a bricolage where researchers must constantly adapt their methodological device to a changing context, from one digital platform to another and in the face of untimely changes in their operating modes. Such ethical reflection by researchers contributes to highlighting aspects that are hardly visible otherwise, except in the event of an incident or malfunction. Documenting the process step by step thus meets the necessary transparency to account for the choices made.

20Remote observation, online, of epistemic communities, communities of practice or of interest are among the very prominent fields of researchers on the Internet. The following articles take their experience as a backdrop to explain the multiple ethical approaches necessary throughout the process of building the research project and particularly when the object and the context are of a sensitive nature. Thus, the collective article by Victor Piaia, Eurico Matos, Tatiana Dourado, Polyana Barboza and Sabrina Almeida “Ethical issues in WhatsApp research: notes on political communication studies in Brazil” (article in English) focuses on exchanges within WhatsApp groups in Brazil, in the context of political communication. After a state of the art on academic research carried out in Brazil, the authors discuss “procedures, guidelines and risks” for research when it comes to political communication and when one wishes to design a method for collecting data online respecting an ethical framework. They also question the issues around the position of the researcher in a digital context.

21Louis Bachaud goes even further in his article (in English) “Navigating gray areas: ethical issues in studying online antifeminist communities”. In this text, the author sheds light on the particular constraints of this type of investigation in order to arm young researchers in a complex legal and technological context. Based on a practical case, the study of online anti-feminist communities, his approach aims to “reconcile the multiple legal and institutional injunctions, the recommendations of learned societies”, and the practices of researchers, going through the complete process from study design to the publication of results.

22Stéphane Djahanchahi also presents in his contribution his practice as a researcher. He analyzes research issues in a field where an illegal practice or exchanges concerning it can be observed. Analyzing the discussions in online forums devoted to the production and use of cannabis, particularly for therapeutic purposes, but outside institutional and legal frameworks, this contribution focuses on the processes of legitimizing illegal “practical know-how”. Exchanging in a gray area and on the margins of legality, the observed communities require a particular positioning of the researcher and are here at the origin of a methodological reflection integrating among other things the impossibility of citing verbatims. Faced with these constraints, the author advocates inductive ethics, adapted to the variables of complex terrain. This approach raises important questions. On these minefields, would ethics then become a malleable ethics? What remains of the universals, if there are any, to guide the work of young researchers?

23These four feedbacks illustrate the diversity of the ethical questions of an epistemological and methodological nature, linked in particular to the level of “sensitivity” of the fields analyzed. This reflexive dimension around research practices can usefully feed the questions concerning research data, dealt with in the previous issue of the RFSIC devoted to data papers.

Complementary perspectives around professional practices and training in the field of information-communication

24The richness of the ethical questioning confronted with digital technology invites us to examine two complementary perspectives: one concerns the professional practices of professions linked to information and communication and the other, the training of researchers.

25Whether it is journalism, information, documentation or communication professions, ethical questions are at the very heart of their professional practices and go well beyond the drafting of ethical codes. The other perspective concerns ethics training and the necessary acquisition of digital literacy by researchers. This issue of ethics training is naturally related to the two axes dealt with in this dossier, the questioning of digital technology and the feedback from experiences in the field that pose problems for researchers. It constitutes a very rich perspective and questions an academic society such as the SFSIC as to the training formats and pedagogical practices to be developed, especially for young researchers.

26Ethics and transformations of professional practices in information-communication related professions. In the perspective of work carried out a few years ago within the RESIPROC network (Catellani, Domenget, Maas, 2017), the aim is to start from professional practices in different sectors of activity linked to information and communication, to analyze their transformations and to question the consequences of an ethical perspective for these transformations. There are indeed a number of principles, rules, and ethical questions that practitioners ask themselves in the exercise of their profession, which, when they are debated, can be written into codes, charters, etc., developed as tools for the supervision and recognition of professional practices. The transformations of the professions are marked in particular by tools, a generalization of the use of digital devices of communication taken into account in part in the regulations, like the RGPD. Transformations such as the mediation of professional practices by algorithms, or even AI, directly question the ethics of professions. Faced with the hegemony and potential excesses of GAFAM or other Web giants, in the capacity to store and process data, new jobs or new functions have appeared within companies requiring an ethical dimension. In this context, what is the real role, strategies and tactics of the data controller, the data protection officer, the data analyst, the community manager, the traffic manager, etc.? More broadly, what are the interactions from an ethical point of view between the professional world and the regulations (in particular the RGPD)? Indeed, if since the awareness of the data leakage and the commercial power generated, we are witnessing a - literal - raising of the shield of Europe (privacy shield) in front of the American “pure players” and the giants of domestic computing, how are the new concerns about the right to information and the value of private life translated? What ethical regulation of professional practices is possible? What assessment can be made of the numerous professional charters and codes of ethics?

Ethics and literacy: training devices and pedagogical practices

27Information and communication devices require new skills of analysis and decoding, constituting the basis of a digital literacy. Indeed, several recent polemics have revealed how deep fake technologies produce very convincing information that requires us to question the renewal of information evaluation skills. In the same way, concerning the manipulation of individuals, social media and their media resonances have wide-ranging sociological, political, personal and epistemological consequences. The individual dimension of the relationship between ethics and reflective practice can be extended to cognitive approaches and to social dimensions, notably in terms of regulation processes. This reflection also concerns the individualized and situated pedagogical practices of faculty in higher education aiming at the acquisition of a critical posture via the mastery of tools for manipulating information and opinions. More broadly, it is a question of opening the reflection to the transformation of ethical questioning into organized and structuring training devices (doctoral training, methodological workshops, etc.) and to analyze concrete learning situations. How is doctoral training structured when it aims at training in research ethics? What mechanisms exist and what are their effects? How can ethics be learned through sensitivity and concrete cases? How do the increasing number of critical approaches (critical digital studies, critical literacy, critical privacy studies, empowerment, etc.) mobilize the relationship to education and pedagogical practice?

28These questions could be the subject of future work and contributions to be published in a future issue of the journal or in a collective publication. For autumn 2022, GER GENIC is also working on a seminar on sharing experiences of ethical issues in a digital context, which will be particularly oriented towards young researchers. This projection towards the future also raises the question of the role of the French Society of Information and Communication Sciences (SFSIC) as an actor accompanying our community on these questions, by proposing reflective and spaces of discussion. This issue is the fruit of a process in which we surveyed the community of our colleagues in SIC and sketched out areas of legitimate interventions by our national academic society (Domenget and Wilhelm, 2018). At the same time council, guarantor of a framework of collective reflection, bearer of a dialogue with the national and international bodies and institutions concerned, the SFSIC also works on the framework of training, for graduate students as for young researchers and as such must seize this issue very concretely. Among the avenues already identified in the 2017 survey, the preferred modality is that of a consultation, by a bottom-up approach, starting from practice in the field to better accompany the scientific community. The past and future work of the GENIC group is in line with this approach.

29Balicco, L., Broudoux, E., Chartron, G., Clavier, V. et Paillart, I. (dir.) (2018). L’éthique en contexte info-communicationnel numérique. Déontologie, régulation, algorithme, espace public. Louvain-la-Neuve : De Boeck Supérieur, 158p.

30Balbo, F., Berreby, F., Boissier, O., Bonnemains, V., Bonnet, Bourgne, G., Ganascia, J.-G., Mermet, B., Simon, G., de Swarte, T., Tessier, C., & Voyer, R. (2018). Ethique et agents autonomes. ANR-13-CORD-0006, URL : https://ethicaa.greyc.fr/​media/​files/​ethicaa.white.paper.pdf

31Calabrese, L., Pérez Lagos, C., (2022). “L’affaire Cambridge Analytica sur Twitter : résignation ou résistance face à la surveillance numérique ?”, Terminal, 132-133, URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/​terminal/​8251

32Catellani, A., Domenget, JC. et Le Moing-Maas, E. (dir.) (2017). Professionnalisation et éthique de la communication (1) : des principes à la formation, Communication et professionnalisation, (5). URL : https://wh4.uclouvain.be/​ojstest/​ojs3/​index.php/​comprof/​issue/​view/​93

33Dewey John, “What does pragmatism mean by practical?”, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1908, 5(4), 85–99

34Domenget, JC. et Wilhelm, C. (2018). L’éthique des pratiques de recherche liées au numérique en SIC : le rôle de la Société Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication. Dans Balicco, L., Broudoux, E., Chartron, G., Clavier, V. et Paillart, I. (dir.). L’éthique en contexte info-communicationnel numérique (p.101-111). Louvain-la-neuve : De Boeck.

35Dynamiques des recherches en SIC, URL : http://cpdirsic.fr/​wp-content/​uploads/​2019/​08/​dyresic-web-08-2019.pdf

36Franzke Aline Shakti, Anja Bechmann, Michael Zimmer, Charles Ess and the Association of Internet Researchers avec Carsten Wilhelm (2020). Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0. URL : https://aoir.org/​reports/​ethics3.pdf

37Latzko-Toth Guillaume et Pastinelli Madeleine, “Par-delà la dichotomie public-privé : la mise en visibilité des pratiques numériques et ses enjeux éthiques”, tic&société, vol.7, n°2, 2013.

38Morozov Evgeny, Pour tout résoudre, cliquez ici, Éditions fyp, 2014.

39Ricœur Paul (1990) “Éthique et morale” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, T.46, Fasc.1, (Jan.–March), pp.5-17.

40Bibliographical references to understand the framework of the issues dealt with by institutional research ethics committees

41Loi Jardé: Decree No. 2017-884 of May 9, 2017 Decree No. 2017-884 of May 9, 2017 amending certain regulatory provisions relating to research involving the human person; see also the institutional mechanism summary page: Universal Medica. “Biomedical Research Reform: the Jardé Law”, November 6, 2017. https://www.universalmedica.com/​fr/​reforme-recherches-biomedicales-loi-jarde/​.

42The national federation of Research Ethics Committees, which federates all academic and hospital research ethics committees: Federation of RECs https://www.federation-cer.fr/​; definition of ethics with presentation of the history of bioethics committees: Federation of RECs “What is ethics?” https://www.federation-cer.fr/​qu-est-ce-que-l-ethique/​regards-sur-l-ethique,24563,40661.html

43Circulation of a request for review of a file to an REB “How do we know if we should ask an IRB or a Joint Consultative Commission for an ethical opinion?” https://www.federation-cer.fr/​comment-savoir-si-on-doit-demander-un-avis-ethique-a-un-cer-ou-a-un-cpp/​comment-savoir-si-on-doit-demander-un-avis-ethique-a-un-cer-ou-a-un-cpp,24565,40663.html