DIGITAL ETHICS AND CRITICAL CITIZENSHIP ON SOCIAL MEDIA: A LITERATURE REVIEW AND PEDAGOGICAL CHALLENGES IN LATIN AMERICA

Abstract

This article reviews recent literature on digital ethics and citizenship education in social media to identify emerging pedagogical approaches and ethical challenges in contemporary education. A literature search was conducted for studies published between 2020 and 2025 in Scopus, ScienceDirect, Redalyc, SciELO, and Dialnet, selecting works focused on digital ethics education, critical citizenship, and the pedagogical use of social media in school and university contexts. The analysis revealed four main themes: digital ethics as the foundation of critical citizenship; the shift from approaches focused exclusively on security to frameworks of ethics of care and deliberation; gaps in teacher training to promote observable behavioral changes; and the incorporation of communicative responsibility, data governance, and informed consent into educational practices. The results show conceptual progress, but also limitations in the assessment of civic-ethical performance (such as verifying, attributing, dialoguing, and rectifying) and a weak curricular translation of these criteria into tasks and rubrics, especially in online collaborative activities and those focused on digital equity. It is concluded that digital ethics education should be considered a cross-cutting theme in civic education, shifting the focus from "how much they publish" to "how they deliberate and care." Furthermore, it is recommended to prioritize assessable interventions, such as a cross-cutting module on digital ethics, teacher training programs centered on care and deliberation, and support and equitable access policies that strengthen critical autonomy, social responsibility, and democratic participation in digital environments.