Donor Malign Influence Campaign at Harvard
Dr. Joan Donovan
Dr. Joan Donovan is one of the world’s leading experts on misinformation, disinformation, online extremism, and media manipulation. Beginning in October 2021, Dr. Donovan ran into a wall of institutional resistance and eventual termination after she and her team at Harvard’s Technology and Social Change Research Project (TASC) began analyzing thousands of documents exposing Facebook’s knowledge of damaging disinformation being spread through its platform. Those documents, known as The Facebook Papers, were brought to light in September 2021 by former Whistleblower Aid client Frances Haugen, who previously worked as a product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team.
When Dr. Donovan announced that she had lawfully obtained the Facebook Papers and her team was preparing to create a public archive, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Pricilla, via their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had just committed $500 million to the University. To protect the donation, Kennedy School leadership, at the direction of Dean Douglas Elmendorf, imposed an escalating series of retaliatory actions designed to stop Dr. Donovan’s work.
Throughout the nearly two-year campaign to silence Dr. Donovan, Harvard violated its own code of conduct and commitment to academic freedom. Specifically, the Kennedy School barred Dr. Donovan from using the millions of dollars she raised specifically for her academic research, constricted her team’s ability to grow or even exist by prohibiting hiring, and denied her the right to speak with donors or host any public events. Perhaps most insidious was that Harvard laid claim to her work product and intellectual property in an effort to permanently suppress her research into Facebook.
Whistleblower Aid submitted Dr. Donovan’s lawful whistleblower disclosure to the President and General Counsel of Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office calling for an impartial investigation into Facebook’s inappropriate influence at the Harvard Kennedy School.
