Big Tech Accountability: Boosting the Impact of Whistleblowers

Corporate whistleblowers have been essential to our understanding of how big tech works. Among other subjects, whistleblowers have revealed information about internal policy debates  about the use of algorithms and how tech companies have circulated mis/disinformation online for power and profit. For this project, the Capstone team examined the type of revelations which four technology company whistleblowers made, how they got their messages across, and the response on social media. Using the well-known framework of Protess et al,  the Capstone team looked at both personal, individual and substantive impact of their revelations. The team scraped data from Twitter, Google, and Facebook beginning in August 2020 and ending in March 2023. To measure attention online, they mapped the peaks and troughs to see correlations with particular events such as congressional testimony. With the exception of Frances Haugen and Daniel Motaung, the team found that the whistleblowers did not receive enduring attention on social media nor in the media. When whistleblowers did receive attention, it usually lasted around 24 hours across social media channels, a pattern observed in other studies of news media attention in the age of social media.