REVIEWER 2 - CRITICAL REVIEW
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**Reviewer 02 Assessment**
**Paper:** CORPORATE COMPLICITY AND DIGITAL ACCOUNTABILITY: A MIXED-METHODS ANALYSIS OF THE TECH FOR PALESTINE BOYCOTT DATASET (2023–2025)

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### **1. Overall Impression**

**Immediate Reaction:** The manuscript addresses a timely and politically charged topic with clear humanitarian relevance. However, it presents as an advocacy document masquerading as academic research. The framing is heavily partisan from the outset, using loaded terminology ("colonial control," "digital apartheid," "structural violence") that undermines scholarly objectivity. While the mixed-methods approach is appropriately chosen, its execution appears designed to confirm pre-existing conclusions rather than test hypotheses.

**Breakthrough vs. Incremental:** Incremental at best. The application of mixed methods to a novel dataset could have been valuable, but the analysis lacks the critical distance required for Tier-1 publication. The core finding—that a boycott movement documents corporate involvement—is self-evident from the dataset's origin.

**First Impression Summary:**
- *Strengths:* Addresses an understudied intersection of technology ethics and human rights; comprehensive dataset; methodologically ambitious.
- *Concerns:* Severe confirmation bias; weak causal claims; polemical framing that compromises scholarly rigor; inadequate handling of positionality.

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### **2. Technical & Scientific Assessment**

**A. Problem Definition**  
**Score: 2/5**  
- The humanitarian motivation is clear but presented as axiomatic rather than critically examined.  
- Fails to substantively engage with counterarguments about technological neutrality or economic interdependence.  
- Research questions are descriptive rather than analytical, focusing on "how" activists document complicity rather than testing the validity or impact of these claims.

**B. Methodological Soundness**  
**Score: 1/5**  
- **Fatal Flaw:** Risk scores (1-5 scale) are assigned based on the authors' interpretation of secondary sources, introducing extreme subjectivity. No validation of these scores against independent standards.  
- **Cherry-picking:** Exclusive reliance on sources aligned with the boycott movement's perspective (Amnesty, HRW, Who Profits) while ignoring industry or government perspectives.  
- **Circularity:** Using the dataset to analyze the dataset's own categorization scheme.  
- **Statistical Overreach:** Correlation matrices imply causation where none is established. Spearman's rho between "risk scores" and "NGO mentions" is tautological—both measure the same underlying bias.

**C. Results & Evidence**  
**Score: 1/5**  
- **Reproducibility Crisis:** No access to raw coding scheme or inter-rater reliability measures for qualitative analysis.  
- **Missing Controls:** No comparison with technology companies not in the dataset to establish what distinguishes "complicit" from "non-complicit" firms.  
- **Exaggerated Claims:** Statements like "transforms digital traces into verifiable evidence" are unsupported—the evidence remains circumstantial and interpretation-dependent.  
- **Baseline Failure:** No engagement with literature on false positives in corporate complicity documentation.

**D. Contribution to the Field**  
**Score: 2/5**  
- Documents an existing social movement but offers little theoretical advancement beyond applying established concepts (digital witnessing, epistemic justice) to a new case.  
- Unlikely to be cited beyond advocacy circles due to methodological limitations and partisan framing.  
- Fails to engage with business ethics literature on supply chain responsibility in meaningful depth.

**E. Writing & Presentation**  
**Score: 3/5**  
- Logically organized but persistently uses advocacy language that undermines scholarly tone.  
- Tables are clear but often present subjective scores as objective data.  
- Abstract and introduction frame conclusions as premises.

**F. Ethical & Transparency Standards**  
**Score: 2/5**  
- No IRB mentioned (human subjects risk in analyzing activist communications?).  
- No data/code availability statement—critical for verifying subjective coding.  
- **Questionable Practice:** Presenting interpretation-laden risk scores as quantitative "findings" borders on misrepresentation.

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### **3. Strengths**

- Timely topic at intersection of technology ethics, human rights, and corporate accountability
- Comprehensive compilation of diverse data sources
- Appropriate choice of mixed-methods design for complex phenomenon
- Acknowledges positionality (though inadequately addresses its implications)

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### **4. Weaknesses**

**Major Flaws:**
1. **Circular Analysis:** Using activist-curated data to validate activist perspectives without independent verification.
2. **Subjectivity Masked as Objectivity:** Unvalidated risk scores presented as quantitative evidence.
3. **Confirmation Bias:** Exclusive reliance on ideologically aligned sources.
4. **Causal Overreach:** Implies but never demonstrates that documentation leads to accountability.
5. **Theoretical Superficiality:** Name-drops decolonial theory without rigorous application.

**Minor Flaws:**
- Inconsistent citation formatting (e.g., "?" placeholders in references)
- Repetitive description of methods in Results section
- Vague definitions of key terms like "distributed responsibility"

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### **5. Recommendations for Improvement**

**Required for Resubmission Anywhere:**
1. **Independent Validation:** Have risk scores coded by researchers unfamiliar with the boycott movement and measure inter-rater reliability.
2. **Control Group:** Analyze a matched sample of technology companies not in the dataset to identify what factors actually predict inclusion.
3. **Alternative Explanations:** Systematically engage with counter-narratives about technological neutrality, economic development, and security needs.
4. **Methodological Transparency:** Publish full coding scheme, raw data, and analysis scripts.
5. **Neutral Framing:** Rewrite using scholarly rather than advocacy language throughout.

**What Would Make It Acceptable:**
- Transform from descriptive documentation to analytical framework testing hypotheses about what distinguishes documented companies from peers.
- Replace subjective risk scores with objective measures (e.g., contract values, technical specifications).
- Engage substantively with business and legal scholarship on complicity standards.

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### **6. Verdict**

**Overall Score: 1/5 - Strong Reject**

**Justification:** This paper suffers from fatal methodological flaws that cannot be addressed through revision. The core analysis is circular: it uses activist-curated data to validate activist perspectives while presenting subjective interpretations as objective findings. The unvalidated risk scoring system and exclusive reliance on ideologically aligned sources demonstrate confirmation bias that undermines any claim to scholarly rigor. While the topic is important, the approach is more advocacy than academia. A Tier-1 journal cannot publish research where the methodology guarantees the predetermined conclusions. The authors should consider publishing in advocacy venues or completely reconceptualizing the study with proper controls and validation.

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**Reviewer 2 Style Compliance:**  
- Skeptical stance maintained throughout  
- Demanded justification for subjective methodological choices  
- Highlighted ethical concerns about presentation of advocacy as analysis  
- Unforgiving of circular reasoning and confirmation bias