The Revue Française des Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication (SIC) dedicates a special issue to " ethics in the digital context ". If the ethical questions and stakes do not date from the digital era, this dossier proposes to emphasize the specificities linked to the digital era.

Référence : 1

This dossier on is based on three positionings that run through the whole questioning:

• Ethics under the info-communication prism: "ethics is not simply a necessity but it also comes from a desire to regulate digital practices, to develop a critical spirit and a dialogue aiming at questioning differently certain fundamental principles of research. These questions are situated in the particular field of CIS. Indeed, what is a digital ethics? What are the ethical questions raised by digital technology from the point of view of information and human communication?
• Ethics as a situated practice: Ethics is neither of a legal nature, nor an expertise, but a form of questioning about concrete problematic situations that is expressed in action, below legal or regulatory frameworks, when contradictory value logics are at work. "A reflection on the social and ethical stakes of research practices and protocols could contribute to highlighting this unthought of protocols for evaluating the ethical stakes of research, initially designed for research in the life sciences, and whose field of application has recently been extended to the social sciences.
• Ethics in the international focus: "Although a universal principle, understandings of ethics and its implementation are dependent on situated, localized contexts, which are also culturally and socially diverse when viewed internationally.

In the perspective of Dewey's work, Manuel Zacklad and Antoinette Rouvroy, in relation to the ethics of AI and its controversies, underline the importance of taking into account the question of the participation of actors, constituted as publics, in the very definition of the problems to be addressed. Their reflection leads to analyze six spaces of controversies of digital ethics and connectionist AI: controversies related to issues of digital culture and beliefs related to AI autonomy and data objectivity, related to impacts on employment and associated societal transformations; related to work and work organization modalities; related to citizenship, diversity, equal opportunities and transparency; related to modalities of participation of users (and non-users) in the technical choices that impact them and related to the carbon neutrality of the digital and to territorial planning.

Thomas Hoang, Sandra Mellot and Magali Prodhomme take a similar approach to a situated ethic concerning the relationship between ecology and digital technology. They analyze the construction of an ethics of digital ecology in two differentiated spaces, one media and the other artistic. " This examination of the social stakes of mediation, mediatization and remediation of digital ecological problems, attentive to the diversity of points of view, underlines the existence of different ways of apprehending and defining ethics.

In connection with the promotion and implementation of open science (OS), Joachim Schöpfel and Otmane Azeroual present the results of a survey of developers, project managers and users of "research information systems" around two aspects: "ethics as an object of the data model of these systems (metrics), and the ethical aspect of the implementation and use of these systems".

Alexandre Sbabo analyzes the interactions between ethics and identity in a digital environment through a "semio-energetic" approach. He explores how interactions with the digital environment refer to issues concerning the identity of subjects and economic logic. The author explores this subject by using semiology "to show with simple examples how the use of digital devices changes the interactional approaches and thus creates an ethical problematic that he brings closer to the notion of trust".

In their article on "Invisible Ethical Work on Digital Platforms" Camille Alloing and Mariannig Le Béchec draw on the analysis conducted during a project that led them to collect data from several types of digital platforms, one dedicated to participatory financing and the other to socio-numerical networks. They explain how their reflections led them to modify not only their methods - going so far as to build their own extraction software rather than using the platforms' APIs to avoid being subject to their particular "observation windows" - but also certain aspects of their research.

Victor Piaia, Eurico Matos, Tatiana Dourado, Polyana Barboza, and Sabrina Almeida studied exchanges within WhatsApp groups in Brazil, in the case of political communication. They discuss the "procedures, guidelines and risks" for research "when it comes to political communication and we want to design a method to collect data online within an ethical framework." They also question the issues surrounding the position of the researcher in a digital context.

Based on a practical case, the study of anti-feminist online communities, Louis Bachaud proposes to highlight the particular constraints of this type of investigation in order to arm young researchers in a complex legal and technological context.

Stéphane Djahanchahi, for his part, analyzes research issues "when it is interested in a field where one can observe an illegal practice or exchanges concerning it". Analyzing discussions on online forums dedicated to the production and use of cannabis, especially for therapeutic purposes, but outside of institutional and legal frameworks, this contribution focuses on the processes of legitimization of illegal "practical know-how".

Contents

• Jean-Claude Domenget, Carsten Wilhelm, Béatrice Arruabarrena, Camille Alloing, Christine Barats, Orélie Desfriches, Gérald Kembellec, Mariannig Le Béchec, Franck Renucci, Marta Severo, Brigitte Simonnot and Samuel Szoniecky: Questioning ethics from the CIS in a digital context.
• Carsten Wilhelm: A German Perspective on Research Ethics in Communication Studies.
• Manuel Zacklad and Antoinette Rouvroy: The situated ethics of AI and its controversies.
• Anh Ngoc Hoang, Sandra Mellot and Magali Prodhomme: The digital questioned by the situated ethics of political ecologies. Illumination by the info-communication approach on the emergence of ecological questionings of the digital in the French public space.
• Joachim Schöpfel and Otmane Azeroual: Research information systems: a new object of ethical questioning.
• Alexandre Provin Sbabo: Ethics, identity and digital environment: some considerations for an interactional approach.
• Camille Alloing and Mariannig Le Béchec: Ethics as a method in communication.
• Bypassing digital platforms to ensure the quality of research data.
• Victor Piaia, Eurico Matos, Tatiana Dourado, Polyana Barboza and Sabrina Almeida: Ethical issues in WhatsApp research: notes on political communication studies in Brazil.
• Louis Bachaud: Navigating Grey Areas: Ethical Issues in Studying Online Antifeminist Communities.
• Stéphane Djahanchahi: Ethical issues of an investigation on anonymous communicative acts around a controversial health practice.