Joan Donovan was fired by the Kennedy School earlier this year, for what it’s worth.
The Boston Globe reports:
Prominent disinformation specialist files whistleblower complaint against HarvardProminent online disinformation specialist Joan Donovan is seeking “an urgent and impartial investigation” into allegations of improper donor influence at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, which she claims fired her after she and her research team began analyzing a trove of documents pointing to “significant public harm” caused by Facebook.Donovan, who joined the Kennedy School in 2018 and served as director of the Harvard Technology and Social Change Research Project, allegedly encountered a “wall of institutional resistance and eventual termination” after her team began reviewing thousands of documents from the so-called Facebook Files, Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group based in Washington D.C., said in a statement Monday.Harvard rejected Donovan’s claims on Monday, saying allegations that Facebook exerted any influence on the school’s research were “baseless” and that Donovan was not fired.“The [whistleblower] document’s allegations of unfair treatment and donor interference are false,” a Kennedy School spokesperson said in a statement. “The narrative is full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research.”But Whistleblower Aid alleged that Donovan’s team began to feel pressure in October 2021, when she announced during a university meeting that she had legally obtained the so-called Facebook Files, which showed the social media giant, now known as Meta, tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms.Donovan said at the meeting that she planned to “create a public archive” of the documents and host workshops for researchers and journalists, according to Whistleblower Aid. But a “Facebook PR executive” at the meeting became “irate” when Donovan discussed the matter, the group alleged.“Following the meeting, [Kennedy School] Dean [Douglas] Elmendorf began a two-year campaign to purge Dr. Donovan, silence her voice, decrease her public profile, and stifle her team’s impactful research,” the group alleged.
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