Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which populist leaders in developing nations leverage digital platforms to redefine public accountability, with a specific focus on the governance model of West Java’s Governor, Kang Dedi Mulyadi (KDM). Using a critical netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2015), this study analyzes five purposively selected YouTube videos, featuring direct governor-official interactions, totaling 137 minutes of footage. Initial open coding generated 161 codes, subsequently reduced to 116 final codes through thematic analysis. The findings reveal that public accountability has transformed into a dramatic, populist, and performative spectacle, with five interconnected themes emerging: accountability as spectacle (audit dramatization and public interrogation), populist leadership (personification of accountability and anti-bureaucratic rhetoric), simulated transparency (unverified claims substituting for documentary evidence), performative governance (ritualized reporting and staged oversight), and structural critique (substantive criticism of systemic inequality and critiques that articulate real problems yet simultaneously prevent structural solutions by channeling reform toward charismatic leadership rather than institutional change. We propose the term “virtual accountability” to capture this new form of governance. It emerges when digital platforms, populist politics, and institutional weakness come together. Using Debord’s (1967/1994) spectacle theory, Power’s (1997) audit society, and Weber’s (1922/2019) bureaucracy as our lenses, we show how platforms are reshaping accountability in fundamental ways. Our findings point to practical steps for strengthening institutions against performative governance. This work also pushes critical accounting scholarship in new directions from corporate to political contexts and provides methodological tools for analyzing digital governance performances (Polzer & Öner, 2025; Probowati et al., 2026).