![]() ![]() Among other things, the group discussed the behind-the-scenes meetings of their members with national politicians and leaders, now accessible to public purview in a total of over 685 pages of transcripts dealing with health, public policy, and education, among others ( Abbud, 2017). ![]() October 2017, Brazil: A report by journalist Bruno Abbud of the cultural magazine Piauí exposed private conversations in a WhatsApp chat of a right-wing group called Movimento Brasil Livre (see Messenberg, 2017). Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 14(1), (2019) “Do Not Harm in Private Chat Apps: Ethical Issues for Research on and with WhatsApp”, Keywords: engaged research, research ethics, digital ethnography, digital activism, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, chat apps ![]() On the other hand, while thinking through innovative ways of considering ethics in chat app research, we ought to take infrastructure seriously, both the site of research and the research ecosystem embrace transparency and avoid by all means covert bypasses and guarantee full anonymisation to our research subjects. On the one hand, we should rethink and update ‘known’ ways of doing ethics, undertaking at least three conceptual operations: going back to the basics, positing as central the notion of ‘do not harm’, which allows to re-centre the user within the research process avoid reducing research ethics to a one-stop checklist, to privilege instead a recursive, iterative and dialogic process able to engage research subjects moving past the consent form as the sole and merely regulatory moment of the researcher-research subject relationship. This article investigates how digital ethnography inside WhatsApp groups requires up-to-date, innovative ethical guidelines. Yet the high frequency of civic engagement makes ethnographic research a time-consuming exercise. Encrypted chat apps allow for a certain degree of perceived secrecy. WhatsApp has remained under the radar for it is scarcely accessible to overt scholarly scrutiny. ![]()
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June 2023
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