Social media was theorised to shift corporate communication from one-way dissemination towards dialogic engagement. WhatsApp, however, has followed a different trajectory as organisations have progressively adopted the historically interpersonal messaging platform for institutional communication. This trajectory reached a formal inflection point in 2023, when Meta introduced WhatsApp Channels, enabling organisations to broadcast content to unlimited followers who can react to posts but cannot reply to them or message the organisation through the channel. This article presents a systematic literature review, guided by PRISMA 2020, to examine whether WhatsApp Channels represent a re-broadcastification of digital corporate communication: the reconfiguration of an ostensibly social platform into a controlled, largely one-way communication environment. Searches of Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection, supplemented by targeted searches of publisher platforms and scholarly repositories, examined peer-reviewed and grey literature published between 2021 and 2026 on WhatsApp, organisational communication, dialogic communication, platformisation, and social media affordances. No peer-reviewed study was identified that specifically examines WhatsApp Channels through a corporate communication lens. However, converging evidence from affordance theory, platformisation scholarship, and WhatsApp-specific research indicates that Channels formalise a broadcast architecture previously observed in WhatsApp’s use for news and public relations dissemination. The article conceptualises re-broadcastification as distinct from broadcasting, platformisation, and generic one-way communication. It further assesses whether Channels function as digital billboards, finding that while they do not meet the strict definition of a digital billboard, they reproduce its underlying exposure logic. The findings challenge linear assumptions that digital communication necessarily progresses from broadcasting towards dialogue and demonstrate how platform design can reconstruct broadcast communication within environments still characterised as interactive and social.
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