Financial Inscriptions and Social Accountability Processes

Abstract

Social media is changing the practice of social accountability. The release of the Panama Papers on April 3, 2016 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) unleashed a tsunami of over 5 million tweets decrying corrupt politicians and tax-avoiding business elites, calling for policy change from governments, and demanding accountability from corporate and private tax avoiders. The current study uses 297,000+ original English-language geo-codable tweets with the hashtags #PanamaGate, #PanamaPapers, or #PanamaLeaks to consider how financial inscriptions participated in the subsequent Twitter conversation. We specifically examine four aspects of the Twitter- based social accountability process that get at, respectively, the public’s message-based reactions to the Panama Papers, the nature of the emergent social accountability interest network, the participation of financial inscriptions in network interest definition activities, and the “reactivation” of network members by the subsequent release of the Paradise Papers in late 2017. The results illustrate that financial inscriptions, as well as value-based inscriptions, participated in the emergence and coalescing of a social accountability interest network. Furthermore, both active and latent network participants were subsequently reactivated by the release of the Paradise Papers a year and a half later.