Affordances-Driven Ethics for Research on and with Chat Apps: Notes from the Global South

Chat apps have received increasing attention from social science researchers lately. Despite the high frequency of its use for multiple purposes, research in such environments entails specific ethical challenges, more familiar for researchers from the Global South, where chat apps have become an important part of everyday life for a decade or so. This article discusses the ethical conundrums that emerged in two distinct cases in Chile and Brazil, concluding that current frameworks fall short in the sociotechnical dimension. To address this, the article inaugurates the casuistic-heuristic model with an affordances-driven approach, which contemplates the agency of the group members within the interactive processes. The discussion takes place in chat apps digital environments, while it reveals the possibilities and constraints that platforms' features offer during the research design.