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<p>Can digital tools, heralded as instruments of transparency, become architectures of automated silencing? Existing scholarship on whistleblowing has extensively documented the personal and professional risks of retaliation, while research on digital governance often highlights its empowering potential. In this article, we foreground the opposite dynamic: the capacity of digital workplace infrastructures to enact new, opaque forms of control that endanger dissenters. Drawing on theories of surveillance capitalism and media witnessing—bodies of scholarship that remain underutilized in organizational whistleblowing research—we develop the twin concepts of algorithmic retaliation and digital witnessing. Algorithmic retaliation occurs when monitoring systems, automated performance metrics, and network controls are weaponized—or perceived to be weaponized—to identify, punish, and discredit speaking subjects. Digital witnessing is the counter-practice of using personal devices and encrypted networks to create evidentiary accounts of wrongdoing. Analyzing in-depth interviews with 30 public servants in Ethiopian public institutions—including 18 women, 10 individuals with disabilities, and 6 who occupy both intersectional positions, as well as 12 men who provided comparative institutional context—we reveal what we theorize as the digital whistleblowing paradox: the same technological ecosystem that enables witnessing also facilitates more pervasive and deniable forms of retaliation. Our analysis makes three contributions. First, we advance theoretical understandings of technology and dissent by modeling this paradox and its constituent mechanisms, moving beyond a tool-centric view to analyze the digital workplace as a contested terrain of power. Second, we specify the concept of social-digital capital as a critical resource for navigating digitally-mediated dissent. Third, we provide an intersectional account of digitally-mediated retaliation, showing how gendered and disability-related marginalizations shape access to witnessing tools and exposure to algorithmic harm. This article highlights how digital transformation, without deliberate design for equity, can replicate and intensify traditional patterns of institutional silencing, with critical implications for scholarship on digital organizations and inclusive governance.</p>

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The digital whistleblowing paradox: algorithmic retaliation, unequal witnessing, and intersectional vulnerability in the digitizing state

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月9日

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  • Yelkal Mulualem Walle,
  • Birku Gedif Asifaw,
  • Bereket Solomon Hadgu

摘要

Can digital tools, heralded as instruments of transparency, become architectures of automated silencing? Existing scholarship on whistleblowing has extensively documented the personal and professional risks of retaliation, while research on digital governance often highlights its empowering potential. In this article, we foreground the opposite dynamic: the capacity of digital workplace infrastructures to enact new, opaque forms of control that endanger dissenters. Drawing on theories of surveillance capitalism and media witnessing—bodies of scholarship that remain underutilized in organizational whistleblowing research—we develop the twin concepts of algorithmic retaliation and digital witnessing. Algorithmic retaliation occurs when monitoring systems, automated performance metrics, and network controls are weaponized—or perceived to be weaponized—to identify, punish, and discredit speaking subjects. Digital witnessing is the counter-practice of using personal devices and encrypted networks to create evidentiary accounts of wrongdoing. Analyzing in-depth interviews with 30 public servants in Ethiopian public institutions—including 18 women, 10 individuals with disabilities, and 6 who occupy both intersectional positions, as well as 12 men who provided comparative institutional context—we reveal what we theorize as the digital whistleblowing paradox: the same technological ecosystem that enables witnessing also facilitates more pervasive and deniable forms of retaliation. Our analysis makes three contributions. First, we advance theoretical understandings of technology and dissent by modeling this paradox and its constituent mechanisms, moving beyond a tool-centric view to analyze the digital workplace as a contested terrain of power. Second, we specify the concept of social-digital capital as a critical resource for navigating digitally-mediated dissent. Third, we provide an intersectional account of digitally-mediated retaliation, showing how gendered and disability-related marginalizations shape access to witnessing tools and exposure to algorithmic harm. This article highlights how digital transformation, without deliberate design for equity, can replicate and intensify traditional patterns of institutional silencing, with critical implications for scholarship on digital organizations and inclusive governance.