Interesting Articles

[benji]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-distortions-of-joan-donovan
https://archive.ph/ZqOqV

Joan Donovan, one of the world’s leading experts in misinformation, was dying to set the record straight. On a brisk November night, she told me a story about why she’d left Harvard University. It was captured, she claimed, by a corporation she had loudly criticized, one with far too much power over our democracy: Meta.

Her document was not a lawsuit, but a first-person declaration of how the world’s wealthiest university, hamstrung by its “significant conflict of interest,” allegedly mistreated her up to her departure last summer. It had, she claimed, taken the copyright to her book. Stolen her plans to publish confidential Facebook documents. Blocked an event she was required to host. And jeopardized the livelihoods of her staff, the now-disbanded Technology and Social Change Project, which was part of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

“I would be complicit if I kept my mouth shut.”
Joan Donovan

The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, NBC, NPR, and dozens of other outlets (including this one) carried her claims, along with Harvard’s insistence that the team ended for a purely administrative, only-in-academe reason: She was a staff member, not a faculty member, so as a matter of policy, she could not lead research indefinitely. Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard constitutional-law scholar, declared that the university “has to be investigated from top to bottom.” This, Donovan told CNN, was “a knock-down, drag-out fight for my academic freedom.” Her eyes welled with tears.

When the moderator opened up the floor for questions, according to Donovan’s disclosure, Schrage “monopolized the discussion by accusing me that my reading of the documents was inaccurate and that he disagreed with all prior discussion about Facebook.” Donovan claims that she “tried to answer Mr. Schrage’s allegations, but he kept speaking out angrily.” His conduct was “so overwhelming and disruptive,” she claims, that someone else “was forced to raise her voice in an attempt to try and calm Mr. Schrage.” The mood was “tense, awkward, and embarrassing for everyone involved.”

But a recording of the meeting contradicts that account. In a video the Kennedy School shared with me, Schrage is called on to ask a question, and begins by saying, “I disagree with a tremendous amount of the characterization and analysis that’s been provided, but that’s not the topic here.” He does not bring up the leaked Facebook files. He does ask Donovan how she defines misinformation, and whether television-news networks should be punished for reporting it. He also asks whether a company like Facebook should be obligated to take down a media outlet if the Philippine government considers it to be spreading falsehoods. In all, Schrage speaks for three minutes. Donovan responds uninterrupted for five-and-a-half, mostly to his first two questions.

“Thank you, Joan,” another council member says, then asks Donovan to discuss the subject of social media’s financial incentives. Two other attendees go on to raise questions that she also answers. Schrage does not speak again before the session ends, the recording shows.

This was the exchange that Donovan says jeopardized her career. That night, “I was worried I was going to lose my job based on Mr. Schrage’s anger,” her declaration says, and nearly a year later, when she learned that her team would be ending, she would think back to “when Elliot Schrage became enraged over my statements and possession of the Facebook files.”

During that meeting with the dean, Donovan’s declaration says, Elmendorf told her that Harvard would “exercise its ownership of my book,” Meme Wars, because, unlike faculty, “all staff’s research was owned by the University.” Late last year, over dinner in Boston, she told me, “It is what it is: Someone can own my shit. I still know how to work a copy machine.” And in December, she tweeted, “The truth is H took everything from me,” including “my book,” and added, “I truly have nothing left to lose.”

But Harvard does not own the copyright to Meme Wars. By March of last year, the three authors and the provost had signed an agreement that “Harvard hereby irrevocably transfers and assigns to the Authors, in perpetuity and throughout the world, all of its right, title, and interest in the copyright” to Meme Wars, according to documents I obtained. (One exception: Harvard got a royalty-free license to use it “for Harvard’s research, educational, and other scholarly purposes.”) In Donovan’s declaration, the only reference to this agreement is a vague mention of the book being “settled.”

Elmendorf told me that transferring the copyright “seemed the fair thing to do.” And when I asked Donovan if it was misleading to not mention the agreement, she insisted that it was irrelevant because “to me, it is still very true that Harvard laid claim to my book.”

Meme Wars isn’t the only thing Donovan says Harvard took. She has made a series of accusations — at times ambiguous — that her ex-employer is “holding on to my intellectual property,” which the university broadly disputes. She recently asserted to me that Harvard has refused to negotiate with her lawyers over this issue since December (though she declined to put me in touch with them, saying that they do not want to talk to the media). According to Harvard, that is false. “We asked Joan a number of times before she left to tell us what IP she seeks,” a spokesperson told me. “Harvard’s counsel has welcomed conversations with her counsel since then, and has repeated our requests for Joan to identify what she is seeking. We have not heard back.”

Of these allegations, the most-detailed is that FBarchive — Harvard’s online trove of the leaked Facebook documents — was stolen from her by Latanya Sweeney, a professor of the practice of government and technology.

Elmendorf told me that he isn’t aware of any other university that’s built a site like FBarchive. “I don’t understand an argument that the Kennedy School is somehow trying to protect Facebook when we have done that,” he said.

But Donovan says that the dean isn’t a reliable narrator, and that she wasn’t the only one with that opinion. “Dr. Sweeney once told me that she had attended a dinner at Ms. Sandberg’s home along with Dean Elmendorf,” her declaration says. “She was so struck by the closeness of their decades-long friendship that she confided in me her own concerns about Dean Elmendorf’s close, personal relationship with Ms. Sandberg and the potential conflict of interest with the work we were doing.”

Sweeney said that in April 2019, she did dine at Sandberg’s mansion in Silicon Valley, where a Harvard alumni-association representative had invited her to chat about her work with tech executives. But the dean told me that he wasn’t there. And Sweeney confirmed: “I’ve never been at a dinner with Sheryl and Doug. I’ve never been with the two of them at the same time ever.” She added, “I don’t know anything about Doug’s relationship with Sheryl Sandberg.” This story, she says, is a “lie.” (Donovan acknowledges that she “may have inferred” that Elmendorf was at the gathering, but she maintains that Sweeney expressed concern about the pair’s friendship.) Having now read Donovan’s whistle-blower disclosure, Sweeney told me, “I wouldn’t be able to trust her going forward at all.”

In April 2023, Nkonde herself texted Donovan seemingly by accident. “Joan has no money to take [to] her new institution and is demanding tenure,” she wrote, adding a string of laughing emojis. “So far everyone has said no.”

Donovan mulled whether to hit back in ways that she, as a media-manipulation expert, intimately understood. “What do I do?” she asked Collins-Dexter, sharing the screenshot with her. “I want to post it to twitter.”

“That could backfire,” her colleague cautioned.

But later that day, Donovan reported: “I made good gains with academics that follow me on Instagram after I posted the screenshots. Lots of them were wondering what had really happened.”

Donovan then raised the idea of publicizing details of the dispute — anonymously. She asked Collins-Dexter: “Do you have any sock puppet accounts?”

All the while, Donovan’s declaration says, she was “terrified for my staff, who were in need of contract renewals, stable employment and healthcare.”

But throughout last spring, according to texts, emails, and people who worked with her, Donovan was talking to her donors about ending their funding commitments — even though doing so would put her staff out of work even faster than anticipated. (Donovan denied approaching funders about pulling their money, saying, “All of my funders contacted me.”)

After the Crimson reported in February 2023 that their team would be eliminated, Collins-Dexter told me, Donovan asked her to arrange calls and meetings with some of their donors to discuss its future. She organized one such dinner with employees from two foundations, at a French restaurant in New York City, after Donovan initiated contact with them, emails show. Based on conversations beforehand, Collins-Dexter says, she assumed that her boss was going to reassure them that their money was safe until June 2024, the end date publicized in the news. That would’ve been just fine with Collins-Dexter and some of her colleagues, who were telling Donovan that they wanted to stay on the payroll as long as possible, according to texts from the time.

Instead, Collins-Dexter recalls, Donovan told funders to reroute their grants into a nonprofit that she wanted to start, to continue her research post-Harvard. “I was really shocked when I heard Joan start asking funders to pull their funding,” Collins-Dexter told me. She believes that after she tried to push back, she stopped getting invited.

Two major donors, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, had together given or planned to give about $1.8 million to the team. On March 3, 2023, when Donovan texted a teammate about a new funder interested in the nonprofit, she added, “We will get it started with that Hewlett $$ and I’m seeing if MacArthur will divert funds.” She made it official in an internal email days later: “I spoke to MacArthur and Hewlett and they are both going to end their grants early.” By the end of the month, MacArthur was canceling a planned $150,000 payment and Hewlett was canceling an expected $300,000, according to an internal budget document.

Five months after we met in Boston, I confronted Donovan with the findings in this story. Over a call that lasted nearly three-and-a-half hours, she responded to each claim against her, at times in tears.

I ended with the question that had become impossible to ignore: Had she — the famed misinformation researcher — been spreading misinformation?

She was silent at first. “I do stand by what’s in the declaration,” she finally said, “and what I’ve said to you and how I’ve presented what happened to me. I didn’t make up anything. If I had, it would be easy to disprove.” Her voice broke. “I’m merely one woman in the world,” she went on, “and that’s it. And to go up against corporations like Harvard and Facebook is very scary. But that is my truth. That is what I know to be true — that I was on top of it one day, and I was under it the next.”

We hung up. Starting that night and over the following four days, Donovan texted me 88 times. She forwarded me emails, texts, screenshots, voice mails. Each, she insisted, showed the facts to be on her side.

Her messages grew longer, darker. Unprompted, she began to refer to shadowy forces working against her. “There are people who do want me dead,” she wrote. “This line of work is wild and I don’t wish it on anyone. I am looking into changing my legal name so that it’s difficult to hack or find out where I live, by socially engineering access to my banking or property records.” She wrote that she was afraid of being assaulted, of being murdered.

“Harvard and Meta want negative press about me,” she wrote, “and that could get me killed, especially if one person gets it in their head that I’m illegitimate in some way.”

Two powerful institutions were out to discredit her, and my article was just more proof.

“This shows me,” she wrote, “that Harvard and Meta chose you.”

The person considering changing their legal name to be "difficult to hack" is a public professor at Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/ciss/profile/joan-donovan/

Joan believes that your social media feeds should be forced by the government to include news you aren't getting:

Quantifying the effect of misinformation is even harder than defining it. In the debate over why people fall for conspiracies, some scholars say that too much attention is paid to social media’s role and not enough to other factors, like government officials who make false claims on prime-time TV. Studies have failed to reliably find a direct causal relationship between viewing online misinformation and changing specific behaviors, such as switching voting positions. But to Donovan, Facebook’s ability to disseminate falsehoods at unprecedented scale has obvious consequences. When vigilantes take up arms in the wake of online rumors about “antifa” invaders, when people read on their feeds that vaccines are microchipped and voting is rigged, other members of the public — law-enforcement officials, doctors, journalists, election workers — spend time debunking and reassuring. “There are millions of resources lost to mitigating misinformation-at-scale, where the cost of doing nothing is even worse,” Donovan has written. She is among those advocating for “a public-interest internet,” one where social-media feeds would be required to contain “timely, relevant, and local” news curated by librarians.

Enjoy this interview from last year where Joan falsely claims that Sweeney's FBArchive was something only she had and that she personally released and it was what got her "fired" at ~10 minutes:


Note that Sweeney (a Black woman) is still employed at the Kennedy School and her profile openly links to the FBArchive: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/latanya-sweeney