Harvard researcher claims she was ousted to protect Facebook's financial contributions.

• Joan Donovan, a former Harvard researcher, claims that she was dismissed from the university due to her investigation into Facebook.
• Facebook was aware of the harm caused by its services, but chose not to act, according to Donovan's research.
• Facebook has refuted claims that it knowingly ignored the negative consequences of its platform for the sake of financial gain.

Joan Donovan, a social media researcher, pinpoints the precise moment her career took a turn for the worse.

The dispute over her departure from Harvard University, which she calls a firing, has real-world implications for academic freedom, social media, and corporate influence over research.

On October 29, 2021, Donovan, a Harvard research director specializing in social media and disinformation, was invited to speak to a distinguished group of wealthy donors to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, known as the Dean's Council.

Donovan was invited to present her research findings to a group of donors who logged on from their homes and offices via Zoom.

Donovan exclaimed to CNBC, "I was thrilled! This validation of my work confirmed my excitement."

Donovan presented to donors her research on the effects of internet disinformation on American society, which coincided with a recent controversy involving Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's revelation of internal documents.

On Oct. 5, Haugen testified before Congress that Facebook's documents showed the company was aware of its services causing harm, spreading misinformation, and negatively impacting teenagers. However, she stated that the company prioritized profits over safety.

Donovan revealed to Harvard donors that she had also obtained the trove of documents, which she considered the "most important documents in internet history."

She presented an argument like the one Haugen had been stating on national TV: Facebook was aware of the harm its services inflicted, but opted to take no action.

Donovan believed that Facebook was not merely a victim of malicious individuals who took advantage of new technology for their own gain, but that Facebook intentionally created systems that encouraged the most controversial content.

In an interview with CNBC, she stated that the issue was with the technology's design, particularly social media, which provided bad actors with an advantage in spreading novel and controversial content, which often goes viral.

Donovan stated that the issues were not solely due to external factors but also internal Facebook algorithms.

Elliot Schrage, a member of the Dean's Council donor group at Harvard and a former vice president of global communications and public policy at Facebook, eagerly raised his hand to speak during Donovan's Zoom call after she finished explaining her findings.

Donovan received a text from her superior at the Kennedy School after the meeting with Schrage, expressing concern about the intensity of Schrage's anger towards her criticism of Facebook.

The supervisor responded, "If he hadn't gotten mad, we should have worried," according to a text message transcript provided to CNBC.

Your sophistication and fairness in thinking and analysis made me proud.

Schrage declined to comment.

Facebook has publicly denied allegations that it profits from harms caused by its services.

In a response to a 2021 Wall Street Journal series based on allegations made by Haugen, Facebook's vice president of global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg, wrote that the central claim of the series, which is that Facebook conducts research and then systematically and willfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient for the company, is entirely false.

Clegg stated that the assertion could only be made by selectively quoting leaked material and presenting complex issues as if there is always one correct answer.

After diving into her Facebook research, Donovan's support from her superiors didn't last long.

In November, Elmendorf emailed Donovan about her research on Meta, which was previously known as Facebook, following the Dean's Council meeting. The company had recently changed its name on October 28.

The email provided to CNBC stated that he wanted to address issues such as defining the problem of misinformation and determining the appropriate responses, as well as examining how research provides a basis for comments on current events.

Donovan was concerned by the language in the email, which he believed mirrored the talking points used by Facebook executives in public statements. Additionally, he knew that Dean Elmendorf had a close personal relationship with Sheryl Sandberg, the then-chief operating officer of Meta Platforms.

Sandberg's undergraduate advisor at Harvard, Elmendorf, attended her wedding in the summer of 2022.

Donovan stated that he was summoned to the principal's office and interrogated regarding his discussions about Facebook. Despite investigating other platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Google, the dean only inquired about the internal documents at Facebook and the plans for their utilization.

Through a Harvard spokesman, Elmendorf declined to comment for the record.

Sandberg declined to comment on Donovan through an employee, according to Harvard officials who told The Washington Post that Sandberg and Elmendorf never discussed Donovan.

In the upcoming month, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, both Harvard alumni, announced a remarkable commitment: They would donate a half-billion dollars over 15 years to establish a new AI research institute at Harvard, in honor of Zuckerberg's mother's family.

The acceptance of the donation was criticized as a "damning misstep" by two undergraduates in a Harvard Crimson column.

The entire elite higher education system, arguably, has a penchant for auctioning off academic priorities to the highest bidder, as written by Guillermo S. Hava and Eleanor V. Wikstrom. The Crimson column did not mention Donovan.

Since 2018, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has given Harvard and its affiliated entities dozens of grants worth multiple millions of dollars, with the December 2021 donation being the largest.

Donovan claims that her position at Harvard became increasingly untenable as time passed, and she believes that administrators wanted her to leave. She states, "I became persona non grata when I turned my attention specifically to Facebook."

In the summer of 2022, during a meeting with Elmendorf, Donovan learned that she had to wind down her Technology and Social Change Research Project by June 2024, as the dean had instructed her to do so.

During the meeting, Elmendorf informed Donovan that she had no academic freedom and was reminded that she was staff.

Tenured professors are given more protections than Donovan, who is a staff member.

Donovan was constrained and informed that she could not commence any new projects or hire more staff members for the rest of the project.

Donovan stated that the obstruction of academic freedom is a grave violation of intellectual principles and goes against the very purpose of a university, which is to disseminate knowledge.

On August 31, a year before the conclusion date she stated, Donovan was informed by Harvard that the project was being ended and her position as research director was being terminated.

On November 28, 2021, Whistleblower Aid sent a disclosure document to Harvard detailing Donovan's account of her departure. This nonprofit group also worked with Facebook whistleblower Haugen in 2021.

The Office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts is currently reviewing allegations made by whistleblower Aid, which were sent to them by Donovan.

The group submitted Donovan's allegations to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, but a spokesperson for the department stated that the office does not verify or deny the existence of complaints.

Harvard Kennedy School Director of Public Affairs James Smith refuted Donovan's account of her departure in a statement to CNBC. Smith stated that the document's allegations of unfair treatment and donor interference are false. He added that the narrative is filled with inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research.

Smith stated that Donovan's predicament was linked to her academic standing at the university. "According to longstanding policy, all research projects at Harvard Kennedy School must be led by faculty members," he explained.

Joan Donovan was appointed as a staff member to manage a media manipulation project. Despite the departure of the original faculty leader, the School attempted to find a replacement among its faculty members. However, this effort was unsuccessful, and the project was given more than a year to wind down. Despite not being fired, most members of the research team decided to stay at the School in new roles.

Donovan concludes that the core finding of her research was in opposition to Facebook and, ultimately, Harvard.

"I believe Harvard removed me because I disagreed with the company's stance on platforms, which is that staying safe from companies requires acknowledging that this is a broader internet issue, not just a social media problem," she stated.

She concluded that Facebook's design was causing problems, as she picked apart the way it works and argued that it enabled genocide, terrorism, hate, harassment, and incitement.

Donovan was out.

Harvard fired me, but I'm proud of the work we did to ensure my team's safety and the dissemination of important information.

Smith stated to CNBC that Harvard University and the Kennedy School still conduct research on misinformation and social media to this day. He pointed out that a faculty member created and shared online the Facebook Archive, which contains documents that were originally leaked by Haugen.

The Facebook Archive, comprising the documents obtained by Haugen, was made available to the public in October through a joint effort by the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and Harvard's Public Interest Tech Lab, and can be accessed at FBarchive.org.

A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative stated that they had no role in Dr. Donovan's departure from Harvard and were not informed about it until it was reported in the media.