Joan Donovan is a left wing activist who claims to be a disinformation expert. Naturally, the media loves her.
The Washington Post reports:
Boston University hires Harvard disinformation scholar Joan DonovanBoston University has hired prominent disinformation expert Joan Donovan to a tenure-track position in its College of Communication after her dismissal as a Harvard University research director stoked fears about attacks on academic freedom.The private Boston university said Donovan would start as an assistant professor on Sept. 1, a day after Harvard’s formal termination of her role at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. She will teach in the journalism department and the division of emerging media studies, which offers the only doctorates in the college.Donovan, a critic of big social media companies who has kept a low profile since Harvard said it would end her contract, told The Washington Post she planned to return to the public stage.“I’m very excited to be working on producing events, colloquia and series that are about informing the public about technology being used to harm society,” Donovan said. “Our goal is to be helpful within and beyond the university.”Donovan had been director since 2019 of Shorenstein’s Technology and Social Change Research Project, where she had raised more than $5 million for a team of faculty, staff and students studying disinformation and media manipulation.Donovan has studied how false medical information spread, including that which led to excess coronavirus deaths; the use of automated social media accounts in influence campaigns; the role of social media in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot; and the evolution of the QAnon web of conspiracy theories.She has consistently made her evidence and conclusions public to a broad audience through workshops and television interviews, making her more recognizable than many tenured Harvard faculty members and bringing outsize attention to her work. She has also given congressional testimony about deceptive media campaigns.
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