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 $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's charitable arm.
As research director of Harvard Kennedy School projects delving into mis- and disinformation on social media platforms, Donovan had raised millions in grants, testified before Congress and been a frequent commentator on television, often faulting internet companies for profiting from the spread of divisive falsehoods.
Last year, the school's dean told her that he was winding down her main project and that she should stop fundraising. This year, the school eliminated her position.
As one of the first researchers with access to "the Facebook papers" leaked by Frances Haugen, Donovan was asked to speak at a meeting of the Dean's Council, a group of the university's high-profile donors.
According to the Columbia Journalism Review :
Elliot Schrage, then Meta's vice president of communications and global policy, was also at the meeting. Donovan says that, after she brought up the Haugen leaks, Schrage became agitated and visibly angry, "rocking in his chair and waving his arms and trying to interrupt."
During a Q&A session after her talk, Donovan says, Schrage reiterated several common Meta talking points, including the fact that disinformation is a fluid concept with no agreed-upon definition and that the company didn't want to be an "arbiter of truth."
According to Donovan, Nancy Gibbs, Donovan's faculty advisor, was supportive after the incident. She says that they discussed how Schrage would likely try to pressure Douglas Elmendorf, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government (where the Shorenstein Center hosting Donovan's project is based), about creating a public archive of the documents.
After Elmendorf called her in for a status meeting, Donovan claims that he told her she was not to raise any more money for her project, that she was forbidden to spend the money that she had raised ($ 12 million dollars); and that she couldn't hire any new staff.
According to Donovan, Elmendorf told her that he wouldn't allow any expenditure that increased her public profile, and used several Meta talking points in his assessment of her work.
Donovan says she tried to move her work to the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard but that the head of that centre told her that they didn't have the "political capital" to bring on someone whom Elmendorf had "targeted.".
Donovan said the pressure to shut down her project is part of a broader pattern of influence in which Meta and other tech platforms have tried to make research into disinformation as difficult as possible.
Donovan said she hopes that by blowing the whistle on Harvard, her case will be the "tip of the spear."
She claims that Meta pressured Elmendorf to act, noting that he is friends with Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer. (Elmendorf was Sandberg's advisor when she studied at Harvard in the early nineties; he attended Sandberg's wedding in 2022, four days before moving to shut down Donovan's project.)