The writer is the author of ‘Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril’
Last week, when Extinction Rebellion targeted LinkedIn, it wasn’t trying to bring the organisation to its knees. It wanted to connect with potential whistleblowers inside Shell, Exxon, HSBC and the UK’s HS2 high-speed railway. LinkedIn ads targeted those companies’ employees, alerting them to a secure “truth telling” platform to report greenwashing. On the same weekend calling cards were delivered to smart London neighbourhoods, encouraging readers to blow the whistle wherever climate change wasn’t being addressed seriously.
The activist group had tapped into the zeitgeist. Last year, whistleblower cases asserting unprofessional standards in financial services rose by 35 per cent. Deloitte has warned of a new “whistleblower environment” in the pandemic which it attributes to greater workplace health concerns, record unemployment and the compliance problems of staff working from home. (At the same time, Deloitte faced its own whistleblower, who has alleged audit faults in the company’s Beijing office.) Problems at Rio Tinto and at Boeing have also been prompted or exacerbated by information leaked by insiders.