A researcher accuses Harvard of surrendering to Meta: “My dismissal coincided with a donation from Zuckerberg, the largest in history”

Since 2018, Professor Joan Donovan was the Director of Research at the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. Her job was to lead a team of researchers on disinformation and manipulation campaigns on networks and obtain funds for her projects. Everything was apparently going well until the Wall Street Journal In September 2021, it began publishing a series of articles with internal Meta documents, leaked by former employee and “deep throat” Frances Haugen.

Joan Donovan obtained a copy of the thousands of documents that Haugen had removed from Meta. She wanted to organize them and post them on a website called Facebook Archive at Harvard. Then the problems began. A meeting in October 2021 with his superior, Dean Douglas Elmendorf, and other personalities, including a former Facebook official, was the turning point: “In that meeting, when a Facebook executive got angry with me, something changed in the Kennedy School, where I later became a outsider and they put me on the defensive not only to explain my research, but to explain my research specifically about Facebook,” Donovan says via video conference to EL PAÍS.

At that meeting, Donovan said that the documents leaked by Haugen were “the most important in the history of the Internet.” Just a few days later, Donovan received an email from Elmendorf to “discuss his research”: “Since that meeting, my stay at Harvard has not been easy,” he says. In 2022, Donovan was told that he would not continue in his position. In February 2023 he went public and ended up leaving in August. Last December, Donovan denounced Harvard because he believes the university has bowed to Meta's will: “My story is a little complicated, but the way I like to explain it is that Elmendorf has a very long relationship with different Meta executives, particularly Sheryl Sandberg [número 2 de Meta hasta junio de 2022]. What we don't know is to what extent Facebook or Meta pressured him to stop my research,” he acknowledges. Donovan's contract as a teacher lasted until December 2024.

500 million in 15 years

The story of Donovan's departure due to alleged pressure from Meta to his dean has another milestone in December 2021: the largest donation in Harvard history. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, created by husband and wife Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, will donate $500 million to the university over 15 years. “It is increasingly clear that donors have undue influence over Harvard. My expulsion coincided with the largest donation in the entire history of the university. But the money will not come suddenly, but over 15 years. Thus, Facebook has already acquired 15 years of prestige and influence over the largest university brand in the world,” explains Donovan. For his research, Donovan had collected 12 million, which is a considerable amount and Harvard still has more than 3 in its possession. “I hope they return it to the donors so they can distribute it again,” says the researcher.

Meta has not commented on this information and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has issued a brief statement saying that its donation has nothing to do with these events.

The text of Donovan's complaint, filled with messages with Elmendorf and other teachers, compares the practices of Meta leaders, first, to “foreign intelligence services or organized criminal enterprises” in their stealthy influence efforts. And second, to the tobacco and oil industries: “If we look at the field of internet studies and look at who receives funding for what type of research, Facebook is clearly giving millions of dollars to researchers in an effort to bolster positive coverage.” of their platforms. And then among the researchers who criticize them, there have been different cases in which Facebook has tried to influence the publication or get the academics not to publish. That is why it is very similar to the manual of the tobacco industry, big oil companies and pharmaceutical companies. In terms of using the university as a form of public relations for the company.”

This summer a large group of renowned researchers published a series of articles in prestigious scientific journals Nature and Science in collaboration with Meta employees. Donovan believes that it is a dubious and short-term project: “I can't call them truly scientific because what the researchers did was ask questions to Facebook and then the Facebook researchers gave them an interpretation of the data, so the researchers who were independent They never saw the data. In my opinion, when you do scientific research, you should collect your own data,” she says. In addition, Meta took advantage of the project to boast about the results in a biased way, according to Donovan: “Facebook knew that most people were not going to read the full articles. “Meta published a press release stating that the study showed that there were no problems with their algorithms or with radicalization in their products,” he adds.

Harvard's response

Harvard University denies Donovan's accusations, arguing that this research project required the supervision of a university professor (Donovan was hired). And they did not find it, according to a spokesperson for the institution: “After that effort was not successful, more than a year was given for the project to [de Donovan] would end. “Joan Donovan was not fired and most members of the research team chose to remain at the school in new roles.”

Today Donovan is a professor at Boston University, although Harvard is the intellectual owner of her research these years. Donovan's complaint seeks in part to recover her academic work to continue working at her new center.

Donovan clarifies that he would have easily found a new academic responsible for his research. Harvard also claims that the famous Facebook Archive with Haugen's documents is on-line, as Donovan intended. The file is, however, very different from the one projected by Donovan. The search engine allows you to search by keywords and the system simply returns the slides where they appear. But they are loose captures, the context of which is difficult to discern. The investigation of Journal It took several months of work from a handful of journalists: “Harvard took the Facebook archive project from me. He posted it, but it's almost useless. It is difficult to navigate. My vision was to create a database that would allow international collaboration and understanding of those documents. Various governments around the world are trying to understand the negative influence of Meta on teenagers and younger users. “Meta knew there were problems with Instagram and they didn’t do anything about it,” explains Donovan.

Another substantial concern of Donovan is about academic freedom. When the dean announced the end of her project, she warned him that she was not protected by academic freedom: “There are about 6,000 researchers at Harvard who publish and who are in the same situation as me. And no one who publishes controversial research is going to do so if their university does not protect them. “If I stayed at Harvard, posted these Facebook papers, and got sued, I was on my own,” Donovan says.

Meta's chatterbox

The researcher believes that her complaint, made through Whistleblower Aid, an organization that helps people seeking protection from revealing business secrets and that has already collaborated with Haugen, is just one example of someth
ing that Meta does as much as she can: “My story is “Just a small piece of this big puzzle in which we have to understand how this company and others are shaping our institutions so that there is no regulation and there is no clear investigation into the true harms caused by these platforms to society.”

Donovan's experience in other cases leads him to be even more suspicious: “What I know about Meta's public relations strategies to try to kill certain news stories is that they don't start with the journalist to convince him that his story has no validity. They start at the top, they start with the board of directors in the middle. So I wasn't surprised when a week after the meeting, I got an email from the dean repeating all the Facebook PR mumbo-jumbo,” he explains.

Meta is not the only one of these platforms that can more or less inadvertently cause social harm. For Donovan, the difference is what they do when they know their products have defects: “All of these technologies cause similar types of damage, but what the company does about it is as important as the design of the technology itself. And if the company conceals or obfuscates the impact of its products on democracy or public health, then we need to dig deeper to better understand and explore it, because the company itself is not going to do it,” adds Donovan.

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