Ousted propaganda scholar Joan Donovan accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

Thom Holwerda 2023-12-04 Internet 4 Comments

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.
Joseph Menn for The Washington Post

This is why “voting with your wallet” is such an empty platitude, usually used by corporatists trying to absolve corporations from misdeeds and shifting the blame to us, mere consumers. How on earth can us regular folks vote with our wallet when someone like Zuckerberg can just buy the entire “election” without blinking?

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4 Comments

2023-12-05 7:22 am

Morgan
Just the fact that Harvard kept the donations that were specifically given to the research project, instead of returning to the donors or dispersing otherwise as instructed by the donors, warrants a federal investigation into the school. Any other organization that did so would be facing fraud and embezzlement charges.
2023-12-05 9:03 am

Alfman verbose=1
BTW I cannot read a single sentence of the article, not even the headline. 100% of it is behind a paywall.

Anyways I’m guessing this is about the Hamas/Israel war and wealthy donors taking offense to those speaking up for Palestinian rights? If so, this “discussion” seems to be happening a lot lately on college campuses and elsewhere. People are being fired over their opinions.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/olivia-colman-and-1300-actors-defend-fired-scream-star-melissa-barrera-from-censorship-in-open-letter/ar-AA1kRuiZ

While it’s understandably a sensitive topic, I’m not in favor of firing those who don’t have sanctioned opinions. It bodes extremely poorly for freedom of speech if donors and institutions get to decide the opinions we’re allowed to express in order to work.

2023-12-05 10:50 am

sukru
Alfman,

Some more context from NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/1217086770/disinformation-researcher-says-harvard-pushed-her-out-to-protect-meta

Donovan alleged a project she was involved in to publish thousands of internal Facebook documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen was the trigger that led Harvard to shut down her work last year and ultimately eliminate her role. In August, Donovan was hired as an assistant professor at Boston University.

Latanya Sweeney, a Harvard professor who worked with Donovan on the Facebook documents project, known as FBarchive, also denied Donovan’s accusations in a response shared with NPR by Smith.

“The number and nature of inaccuracies and falsehoods in the document are so abundant and self-serving as to be horribly disappointing,” Sweeney said. “Meta exerted no influence over FBarchive or any of our/my work. Just a few weeks ahead of the public launch, we offered Meta the chance to review the archive for security and privacy concerns and suggest redactions, which we independently elected to accept or reject.”

I am not sure whether her ousting (not technically firing) is related to either Facebook or Palestine.

2023-12-05 1:31 pm

Alfman verbose=1
sukru,

I am not sure whether her ousting (not technically firing) is related to either Facebook or Palestine.

Ok, so the article was not related to the war.

That said, it is actually a very similar theme: universities face pressure to please their donors It would seem that Harvard has become a lighting rod for this issue on multiple fronts…
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/11/29/donor-backlash-israel-hamas-response/

In any case, the ability to control money flow gives donors a lot of power over academia. This puts universities in a tough spot.