Whistleblowing Initiatives and the Digital Challenge: the Role of Media in Fighting Corruption from Below

The ubiquitous presence of digital media in contemporary societies has contributed to reshape and broaden activists' repertoires of action related to contentious issues, as in the struggle against corruption. Recently, anti-corruption studies have singled out the role played by digital media in fostering civil society efforts in anti-corruption practices. Similarly, social movement studies have dedicated a large share of their efforts to investigate the ways in which media practices interact with processes of mobilization emergence and endurance. These perspectives have recently crossed their paths to assess how digital media impact upon grassroots anti-corruption initiatives in terms of practices, mechanisms, and processes. However, scarce attention has been paid to the way in which digital media affect social movements consequences at the political level and more precisely over different stages of the institutionalization processes. On the contrary, this work extends the analysis to the mediating role that civil society actors play over the implementation phase of anti-corruption policies, increasingly fostered by the strategic use of digital media. To explore this matter, this study focuses on the whistleblowing phenomenon, framed as an anti-corruption practice that aims at disclosing illegal, immoral, or illegitimate institutional behavior from below. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this work looks at the effect of digital media over the whistleblowing process, shedding light on the intermediary role that civil society organizations play in the anti-corruption field. Building on the Italian case, this work draws on a qualitative research design that combines interview material and document analysis. Nowadays, within the Italian context, major whistleblowing initiatives from below are coordinated by civil society organizations, among which we have selected two case studies that use different repertoires of media in their anti-corruption practices: 1) Whistleblowing PA, an open-source whistleblowing software based on digital reporting system for public administrations provided by Transparency International in collaboration with Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights. 2) Linea Libera, based on traditional reporting channels as a telephone service and a mailbox dedicated to potential whistleblowers and victims or witnesses of corruption, conceived by LIBERA Associations Names and Numbers Against Mafias. These actors were already involved in the campaign Vocidigiustizia, the grassroots initiative that led to the approval of the whistleblowers’ protection act in 2016. Following the positive but partly unsatisfactory result of the campaign, civil society actors kept on mobilizing on the issue and obtained relevant refinements of the legislation at the administrative level, also taking advantage of the window of opportunity offered by the 2019 European legislation. This article suggests that initiatives based on the strategic use of digital whistleblowing platforms have indeed granted grassroots organizations a role of intermediaries in the accountability field.