Ethical engagement, Responsibility and Strategic communication in the Digital Era: practitioners' approaches

Digital communication channels can be subject to exploitation, resulting in harming individuals or societies by promoting fake news, disinformation, radicalization, or social polarization. It is important that communicators are well prepared in identifying, preventing, and responding to such actions, in understanding the vulnerabilities of their audience, while respecting the rights and liberties of the population. Thus, ethical, and strategic communication should be of top priority for institutional communicators, academia, journalists, or stakeholders when addressing security or sensitive issues. The article presents the results of an empirical sociological study, part of an extensive exploratory research within the CRESCEnt project, aiming at identifying elements of enhancing critical thinking, responsible communication, and accountable behaviour. Three European states were targeted by the study: Romania, Spain, and Greece, while 28 practitioners in communication, intelligence and security and law enforcement contributed to the research with significant input on topics related to ethical, successful, and strategic communication characteristics. Ethical communication implies acting by ethical principles, like being truthful, accurate, and well-intentioned. Responsibility is the central element of ethical engagement when informing the public. Effective messages are characterized by clearness, validity of information, novelty and presented in real time. Different types of authorities come into action for the communicators, such as the journalism code of practice, European values, or possible negative social impact.