Battlelines of Accountability: The Discursive Production of Digital Responsibility

Abstract

Public inquiries have become pivotal arenas in which the ethical responsibilities of digital platforms are publicly constructed and contested. Yet scholarship has paid limited attention to the linguistic mechanisms through which these contests unfold. This paper examines the 2024 Australian Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society as a high-stakes moral forum in which technology firms, regulators, and civil society actors engage in discursive struggles over adolescent harm and platform responsibility. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of more than 3000 pages of submissions and hearing transcripts, we show that accountability in this setting is not simply revealed but actively produced through language. Extending prior research on dialogic accountability, we incorporate Searle’s speech act theory to identify how presuppositions and indirect speech acts function as micro-level tools for shaping epistemic contests about what harms occur and responsibility contests about who ought to be held to account. Our findings demonstrate that corporate actors often deploy these linguistic devices to maintain ambiguity, diffuse blame, or perform symbolic responsibility, while legislators and advocates use them to assert duties, establish harms, and press for substantive accountability. We argue that “digital responsibility” emerges as a contingent discursive accomplishment rather than an intrinsic organizational property, highlighting the performative and strategic nature of ethical claims in contemporary platform governance. By theorizing accountability as a linguistically mediated moral practice, the paper advances business ethics scholarship on discursive legitimation, contributing to ongoing debates about how societies should evaluate and regulate the conduct of powerful digital firms.