Ex-Harvard 'misinformation and disinformation' expert accused of lying about Meta's role in her dismissal

A former Harvard so-called expert on misinformation and disinformation is accused of lying about Meta’s role in her dismissal from the Ivy League institution.

Joan Donovan, who’s now an assistant professor at Boston University in the College of Communication, claims Harvard had eliminated her role in a decision that was influenced by Meta, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

According to the report, Donovan didn’t present evidence to support her claim of Meta’s influence in the decision to eliminate her role. She was the Research Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics.

Staffers from the Shorenstein Center and eleven Technology and Social Change Project ex-members told The Chronicle that they saw no evidence that Meta’s influence caused Harvard to eliminate the roles of Donovan or her team.

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When The Chronicle asked Donovan how confident she was in her theory that Meta was involved in her being dismissed from Harvard, she said: “Well, if it is....let’s find out.”

In recent years, Donovan has made several statements in support of left-wing causes and in opposition of those on the right.

Part of her role as a researcher at Boston University was to build an “internet observatory,” to collect online posts of nationally-elected politicians.

“My hope is that in a couple of years we can get a law passed so that the National Archives will take this over and do it permanently,” Donovan told BU Today, the university’s newspaper, on August 16, 2023.

In an interview with Times Higher Education in July 2023, Donovan said she believed research about “manipulation” and “disinformation” have a “right-wing Republican agenda.”

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“You have people like Matt Taibbi pushing the Twitter Files, claiming that academia and the government are working together with tech companies to suppress right-wing voices,” she said.

When replying to a post on X that noted Google highlighted crisis pregnancy centers for women trying to find more information about abortion, Donovan wrote that the tech giant was “hurting women and pregnant people.”