A former Harvard staff member and disinformation expert filed a complaint on Monday against the university, alleging unfair treatment and an unfair firing.
Joan Donovan claims in her complaint, filed with the Massachusetts attorney general and the U.S. Department of Education, that her main project was gutted after Harvard received a record $500 million donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in late 2021, a foundation run by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
Donovan, who now works for Boston University, was leading Harvard’s Technology and Social Change Research Project and primarily focused on misinformation on social media.
“I was duped, in many ways, into believing that I would be protected because I was at Harvard,” Donovan told GBH News. “I never imagined I would need protection from Harvard to do my research.”
Donovan says, at Harvard, she had been working on a project that would make the Facebook Papers public domain.
The trove of internal company documents were disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021 by a former Facebook employee. They reportedly show that the social media platform internally kept track of real-world problems that it had itself created and propagated, and that the tech company had ignored warnings from its own employees about risks.
Donovan said she received the papers lawfully and that she felt she had a duty to publicize them.
“Facebook has set up a series of research engagements where Facebook, by contract, has...
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