Leaking black boxes: whistleblowing from Big Tech companies

“Whistleblowers are among the most precious resources for journalists when it comes to start and conduct investigations in various areas. Whereas corruption, abuse of power or human rights violations are probably the most frequently covered areas of whisteblowing-led journalism, the new challenges posed by the raise of the so-called “datafied society” has revitalized the centrality of leaks in the context of technological “grey areas” (Olesen, 2020). In a time when socially impactful technology plays a central part in a variety of political and societal dynamics and processes, also new forms of secrecy and abuses have emerged. Sociologist Frank Pasquale has proposed the fruitful metaphor of the “black box” (2015) to describe all those socio-technical systems that operate in non-transparent and prone-to-abuse ways. Among these systems it is possible to include corporate algorithms owned and operated by powerful technological companies and platforms, whose inner dynamics and design make them sometimes opaque and non-accountable to their users, lawmakers and to society at large. Whereas some newsrooms - especially in the US - such as ProPublica and The Markup have launched some investigative projects to shed light on certain algorithms and their impacts through different “computational journalism” (Coddington, 2015) approaches, whistleblowers and leaks have also contributed to the understanding of these systems. In recent years, news stories about how tech companies’ algorithms affect civil liberties have started to emerge in the international media, especially in regards to how content moderation and removal policies - that are frequently enforced algorithmically - impact on speech. Stories of this kind have in most cases been based on leaked documents or details revealed by companies employees and contractors who blew the whistle to journalists. Overall, the “journalist-whistleblower” relation is nothing new for journalism and it has been a classical scenario for decades (Liebes and Blum-Kulka, 2004), yet the emergence of leaks in the context of technological black boxes poses new challenges and interesting conflicts in terms of public interest, corporate transparency and the role of journalism. Based on a series of case studies and a review of the available literature, this theoretical paper will analyze the characteristics and peculiarities of leaks in the context of technological black boxes, attempting at advancing the understanding of whistleblowing in the “datafied society”.