Researcher calls for investigation into the relationship between Harvard and Facebook

Joan Donovan, a prominent disinformation scholar who left Harvard University last summer told NBC10 Boston's @Issue that she was terminated from her position at the university as she launched a deep dive in late 2021 into a trove of Facebook files she considers the most important documents in internet history.

The actions impacting Donovan's work coincided with a $500 million donation to Harvard by a foundation run by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. 

"I am calling for an investigation into understanding how Facebook and Harvard in particular interact," Donovan told Cory Smith and Sue O'Connell.

In a whistleblower disclosure, Donovan accuses Harvard of betraying academic freedom and the public interest to protect Meta, Facebook's parent company. Donovan is asking Harvard President Dr. Claudine Gay, Harvard's general counsel, the Massachusetts attorney general's office and the U.S. Department of Education to look in what she calls "inappropriate influence."

"As researchers and as academics, we have to be above the fray," Donovan told @Issue." We have to be in a position where we can't be bought. And that requires the university to say you as an academic are telling the truth and we support you. And if a lawsuit comes, we will protect you. It's cowardice to tell a researcher they're not protected by academic freedom."

The CEO of Whisteblower Aid, a legal nonprofit supporting Donovan, called the alleged behavior by Harvard's Kennedy School and its dean a “shocking betrayal” of academic integrity at the elite school.

"Whether Harvard acted at the company’s direction or took the initiative on their own to protect (Facebook's) interests, the outcome is the same: corporate interests are undermining research and academic freedom to the detriment of the public,” CEO Libby Liu said in a press statement.

In response to NBC10 Boston, the Kennedy School rejected the disclosure’s allegations of unfair treatment and donor interference. “The narrative is full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research,” spokesman James F. Smith said in a statement.

"By longstanding policy to uphold academic standards, all research projects at Harvard Kennedy School need to be led by faculty members. Joan Donovan was hired as a staff member (not a faculty member) to manage a media manipulation project. When the original faculty leader of the project left Harvard, the School tried for some time to identify another faculty member who had time and interest to lead the project. After that effort did not succeed, the project was given more than a year to wind down. Joan Donovan was not fired, and most members of the research team chose to remain at the School in new roles. 

Harvard University and Harvard Kennedy School continue to carry out pathbreaking research on misinformation and the role of social media in society. For example, a Kennedy School faculty member has constructed and posted online the Facebook Archive, the only academic archive that makes available to researchers thousands of leaked Facebook documents. As another example, a Kennedy School faculty member publishes and edits the only peer-reviewed academic journal on misinformation, the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. By policy and in practice, donors have no influence over this or other work.” 

During her interview on @Issue, Donovan pushed back against that statement. 

"The... thing that's confounding about their statement is... that research staff don't have academic freedom. Now, if anything in my disclosure kept me up late at night was the description of the one on one meeting I had with (former) Dean Douglas Elmendorf, where I make the claim that he intimidated me by saying I don't have academic freedom, which meant to me if I proceeded with the Facebook project, I could be personally liable. He's since doubled down on that in the Harvard Crimson and in (Washington Post) suggesting that that is the rule at Harvard. This raises huge concerns for the over 6000 academic research staff that publish at Harvard that aren't faculty. I believe that that is one of the crucial things that come out of this whistleblower complaint, especially.

Before Donovan spoke with NBC10 Boston,  Latanya Sweeney, a professor who leads Harvard's Public Interest Tech Lab, responded to Donovan's whistleblower complaint in a statement provided to NBC10 Boston by the Harvard Kennedy School.

“The number and nature of inaccuracies and falsehoods in the document are so abundant and self-serving as to be horribly disappointing. FBarchive was under my charge from the beginning. Meta exerted no influence over FBarchive or any of our/my work. Just a few weeks ahead of the public launch, we offered Meta the chance to review the archive for security and privacy concerns and suggest redactions, which we independently elected to accept or reject.”

Meta spokesman Andy Stone told NBC News the company had no comment on the dispute between Donovan and Harvard.

In its statement, The Kennedy School said it “did not receive any portion of the Chan-Zuckerberg gift,” which went to Harvard University for an unrelated artificial intelligence initiative.

Both Chan and Zuckerberg went to Harvard, where Facebook was first launched.

.A representative for their philanthropic organization told CNBC that the group “had no involvement" in Donovan’s "departure from Harvard and was unaware of that development before public reporting on it.”