Joan Donovan, a leading scholar of online-disinformation campaigns, is going public about why she believes she was recently forced out of Harvard University’s Kennedy School: because her research threatened the school’s financial ties to the social-media behemoth Meta.
Since 2018, Donovan had been running a team of researchers, focused on misinformation and extremism, at the school’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, where she was research director. Their investigations into how communities use social media to communicate and organize — whether around COVID falsehoods, white supremacy, or the January 6 Capitol riot — were widely covered by reporters and noticed by policymakers. Testifying multiple times before Congress, Donovan became one of the world’s most visible experts on misinformation.
Then in February, The Harvard Crimson reported that Donovan was being forced out of her role and that her team, the Technology and Social Change Project, would be shutting down. Harvard officials at the time cited a requirement that research projects be led by a full-time faculty member; Donovan was an adjunct lecturer in public policy.
The news stunned many in the tech and misinformation-research worlds, and more than 100 people signed a petition protesting Donovan’s removal. Since leaving, in August, Donovan has said little publicly about what happened.
But in a 120-page declaration released on Monday, she alleges that her bosses — starting with Douglas W. Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School — began turning on her in late 2021, after she acquired and made plans to publish a cache of explosive documents leaked from within Facebook, which has since rebranded itself as Meta.
Those plans, she says, drew the ire of a high-ranking former Meta executive and Harvard donor; angered the dean, a friend of another former top Meta executive; and occurred as Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, was preparing to make a major donation to Harvard, his alma mater.
Donovan says that she was forced to leave behind about $3.1 million that she had raised for her team from foundations and philanthropists. She was also told by Harvard that it owns the intellectual property of everything she wrote while there, including, she says, the copyright to a book she co-authored last year, Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.
Donovan is being represented by the legal nonprofit Whistleblower Aid, which is urging Harvard to conduct an investigation. Her allegations are accompanied by dozens of emails and texts with people at Harvard.
“I’m an incredibly idealistic person — I believe you have to live a life of dignity and justice,” Donovan told The Chronicle. “And if I were to keep the lid on this, or to even take a payout to retain my silence, this could happen again easily to the next scholar that dares to take on such large institutions.”
In August, Donovan became an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies on the tenure track at Boston University.
In an email, a Kennedy School spokesman, James F. Smith, said Donovan’s allegations “of unfair treatment and donor interference are false.” He added: “The narrative is full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research.”
Neither Elmendorf nor Meta immediately responded to requests for comment.
A ‘Visibly Agitated’ Donor
Donovan says that her personnel file at Harvard contained no employee complaints or violations of school policy, and that she raised a total of $12 million in grants and gifts for the Technology and Social Change Project. For the first half of her time at Harvard, she says, she received promotions and glowing reviews from her supervisors, including Elmendorf, who praised her “wonderful work” in August 2019. The executive director of the Shorenstein Center in 2020 wrote that her work had “lifted the prestige” of the Kennedy School, according to Donovan’s disclosure.
Their tone shifted starting in the fall of 2021, Donovan says, after The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets began publishing revelations based on thousands of internal documents known as “the Facebook Files.” They revealed, for example, that the company’s research showed that Instagram harmed teenage girls’ mental health, and that Facebook had failed to take action in many instances when employees flagged drug cartels and human traffickers who were using the social network.
Around this time, Donovan came into possession of the Facebook Files in full. On an October 29, 2021, Zoom call with a group of major Kennedy School donors, she says, she revealed that she had the files, called them “the most important documents in internet history,” and expressed concerns the company was harming democracy. On the call, Elliot Schrage, a donor and former head of communications at Facebook, was “visibly agitated” and accused her of having an “inaccurate” reading of the files, according to Donovan’s disclosure.
If I were to keep the lid on this, or to even take a payout to retain my silence, this could happen again easily to the next scholar that dares to take on such large institutions.
In a subsequent email to Donovan, Elmendorf cited the “interesting discussion” on Zoom and asked for a meeting to discuss questions he had — such as “how the research you’re conducting provides a basis for comments you’re making about current events.” Elmendorf, Donovan notes, was the undergraduate adviser of Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, as it was then known, and remains friends with her, as evidenced by a photo of him attending her 2022 wedding. Notes from a meeting that Donovan’s bosses later had about publishing the Facebook Files show that they raised the potential concern of “if Doug gets his feathers ruffled by Elliot.” (Donovan said she had been unable to attend the meeting, but the notes were emailed to her.)
In December 2021, not long after the Zoom call with Schrage, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — the philanthropic foundation run by the Meta founder and his spouse — pledged a half-billion dollars to launch an artificial-intelligence research center at Harvard.
From then on, Donovan says, she and her team faced unprecedented obstacles, such as difficulty in getting hires approved and refusal by the dean’s office to sign off on funded projects. In a meeting on August 24, 2022, Elmendorf told Donovan that he was winding down the Technology and Social Change Project because she had become “too prominent,” according to her disclosure. He said he was not going to approve any expense or hire that “increased my public profile,” she writes. Elmendorf also told her, “I want you to know that you do not have academic freedom,” the disclosure states. “I want to remind you that you’re staff here.”
The narrative is full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research.
In a follow-up email to her, Elmendorf wrote: “When TaSC was small, having this project led by a staff member was a small inconsistency with our rules, and we approved it as an experiment; now that TaSC is big, having the project led by a staff member is a big inconsistency with our rules and our structures for academic work.”
At its height, the Technology and Social Change Project employed about 40 researchers and research assistants, Donovan said. While Harvard generally allows only tenured professors to direct projects, emails from 2019 and 2020 show that the administration granted her exceptions that allowed her to manage grants, including in partnership with a tenured professor, Latanya Sweeney, a computer scientist at the Kennedy School.
Donovan had been employed at Harvard on a contract that was originally set to expire on December 31, 2024, and she says she had been operating under the understanding that it would be renewed. Her end date was at first moved up to June 2024, and then, in July of this year, the Kennedy School told her that her program and role were being eliminated on August 31.
Smith, the Kennedy School spokesman, wrote that “by longstanding policy to uphold academic standards, all research projects at Harvard Kennedy School need to be led by faculty members.” When the faculty leader of the project Donovan managed left Harvard, he said, the school tried unsuccessfully “for some time” to find a replacement. “After that effort did not succeed,” he added, “the project was given more than a year to wind down. Joan Donovan was not fired, and most members of the research team chose to remain at the school in new roles.”
Starting in March, after the Crimson story about her impending departure appeared, Donovan alleges that Sweeney cut her out of the planning process for her proposal to create a searchable, annotated database for the Facebook Files. A version of the project eventually went online in October, but Donovan says that the website minimizes and misstates the role that she and her team played in obtaining and preparing the files.
In an email, Sweeney rejected Donovan’s account. “The number and nature of inaccuracies and falsehoods are so abundant and self-serving as to be horribly disappointing,” she wrote. “FBarchive was under my charge from the beginning. Meta exerted no influence over FBarchive and was relegated to a security review just before the public launch to suggest redactions which we independently elected to accept or reject. All contributions and Meta’s review are documented in detail on fbarchive.org’s history page.”
In Donovan’s eyes, there is only one explanation for Harvard’s about-face: “the possibility my work could upset Facebook,” she writes in her disclosure.
Donovan likens the situation to the tobacco industry’s co-opting of academics and universities to support its products and harm the public.
“The most important work you can do as a scholar is work that studies power structures — not with the intent of undoing them, necessarily, but with the intent of shining a light on how they create the conditions under which we live, work, play, and engage,” Donovan said in an interview. “And for a corporation like Harvard to continue unabated in silencing academics for the purpose of pleasing donors is such an aberration for anyone who considers themselves a truth-teller or for anyone that considers themselves a true academic.”
