Is a famous misinformation expert spreading misinformation?

On trying to get to the bottom of a Meta narrative.

Back in October, I thought it might be interesting to profile Joan Donovan, a world-famous scholar of online disinformation and media manipulation. For years, I’d been reading in the news her sharp observations of our digital hellscape. During the Trump administration, she’d risen to fame as a punk-rock truth-teller, a fearless fighter against fake news and Nazis.

I was curious how Donovan thought her field had changed since 2016. We were up against yet another consequential election, but the big social-media platforms were making it increasingly difficult to independently study what was happening on them. I was curious about something else, too: why she’d left the Harvard Kennedy School months prior, seemingly not of her own volition.

I soon got an answer. I visited her in Montreal and Boston at the end of November; a few days after I got home, she launched a whistleblower campaign that garnered widespread attention, with the help of Whistleblower Aid, the legal nonprofit that’s represented the likes of former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. Donovan claimed that Harvard had eliminated her role and her research team in order to appease Meta, the social-media giant she was so often critical of. “I would be complicit if I kept my mouth shut,” she told me at the time. With that, the direction of the story I’d imagined had taken a turn.

It was a believable story. But was it true? I spent the next six months combing through a 248-page declaration of Donovan’s allegations, which did not present any firsthand evidence. I interviewed several of her former colleagues, who told me they had seen no evidence that Meta exerted pressure on her team or that its influence is what ended it. And I obtained documents, emails, texts, and recordings that indicated that other claims of hers about her time at Harvard were misleading or untrue.

My investigation, published today, ultimately raises a very different question than the one I set out to answer: Is this misinformation scholar spreading misinformation? You can read it here (free to read by making an account with your email).