The Accountability and Transparency of Whistleblowing Platforms Issues of Networked Journalism and Contested Boundaries

ABSTRACT

WikiLeaks has often been criticized for being an organization seeking transparency without being transparent and accountable itself. The paper aims to shed light on how whistleblowing platforms understand transparency and accountability with regard to their own activities and how and whether they implement online-based practices of accountability and transparency. Drawing on the conceptual model of online media accountability developed by Domingo and Heikkilä, the paper analyzes four whistleblowing platforms: the Hungarian MagyarLeaks, the Dutch PubLeaks, the Italian IrpiLeaks and the German Briefkasten of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. This study is based on a two-step methodological approach, applying first a document analysis of publicly accessible information on online practices of accountability and transparency; second, we present findings from in-depth interviews with selected editors from each whistleblowing platform. The study critically discusses the evidence of specific challenges with regard to actor and process transparency relating to the platform’s rationale. In addition, responsiveness does not appear to be a core practice, given that interaction with the audience is generally left to the news media partners, where the leaked material is published. The findings show that whistleblowing platforms have developed unevenly in terms of accountability and transparency.

KEYWORDS:

• Whistleblowing
• hacking
• journalism
• accountability
• transparency
• boundaries

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments, and the journalists as well as the activists that made themselves available for the interviews.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Available here: https://wikileaks.org/akp-emails/. Originally, WikiLeaks had presented on Twitter the release of more than 300,000 hacked emails as they were coming from the highest positions of Erdogan’s party or even from Erdogan himself. According to some Turkish observers, the emails actually didn’t include any newsworthy piece of information and were not sent by the inner circle of Erdogan (Tufecki 2016). AKP party servers were allegedly hacked by hacker Phineas Fisher and it is still unclear how the cache of documents reached WikiLeaks (Cox 2016).

2 The leaks were however published on archive.org. by activist Michael Best after they were leaked over the Internet. WikiLeaks never published these specific database, it only tweeted links to access it. archive.org later removed the material, as it was violating people’s privacy (Cox 2016).

3 See http://blog.zeit.de/open-data/2012/07/30/daten/.

4 Here: https://irpi.eu/chi-siamo/.

5 PubLeaks website went through a complete redesign a few months after the analysis took place. Although no substantial change of content was applied, it is incoherent to link to specific pages as the analysis was based on a different website.

6 The information is available in English here: https://english.atlatszo.hu/about-us-fundraising/.

7 Available here: http://www.zeit.de/briefkasten/index.html.

8 Available here: http://blog.zeit.de/open-data/2012/07/30/daten/.

9 Available here: https://atlatszo.hu/magyarleaks/.

10 Available here: https://irpi.eu/en/irpileaks/data-management-editorial-policies/.

11 More information available at https://thesignalsnetwork.org/mission.

12 More information available at https://www.huisvoorklokkenluiders.nl/english.