Whistleblower allegation: Harvard muzzled disinfo team after $500 million Zuckerberg donation

February 18, 2024March 8, 2024Frank Articles, Blog Disinformation, Facebook, Harvard, Joan Donovan, Kennedy School, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta

“I believed, honestly, that these were the most important documents in internet history,” Joan Donovan said in an interview. “Our role as academics is not to play favorites. It’s not to do P.R. It’s to tell the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. And unfortunately, I lost my job for it.”

By FRANK BAJAK

Dec. 4, 2023

A prominent disinformation scholar who left Harvard University in August has accused the school of muzzling her speech and stifling — then dismantling — her research team as it 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 Joan 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. In a whistleblower disclosure made public Monday, Donovan seeks investigations into “inappropriate influence” from Harvard’s general counsel, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and the U.S. Department of Education.

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.

Data scientist drops Facebook defamation suit

September 12, 2019Frank Articles Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, ThisIsYourDigital Life

July 2, 2019

By FRANK BAJAK

Aleksandr Kogan, the data scientist at the center of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, said he is dropping a defamation lawsuit against the social network rather than engage in an expensive, drawn-out legal battle.

Kogan, 33, sued the social giant in March, claiming it scapegoated him to deflect attention from its own misdeeds, thwarting his academic career in the process. The suit sought unspecified monetary damages and a retraction and correction of what Kogan said were “false and defamatory statements.”

“We thought there was a one percent chance they would do the right thing,” Kogan told The Associated Press. Facebook is “brilliant and ruthless,” he added. “And if you get in their way they will destroy you.”

A Facebook spokesperson said the company had “no comment to share concerning this development.”

The former Cambridge University psychology professor created an online personality test app in 2014 that vacuumed up the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users . The vast majority of those were unwitting online friends of the roughly 200,000 people Kogan says were paid about $4 to participate in his “ThisIsYourDigital Life” quiz.

How Facebook stands to profit from its ‘privacy’ push

September 11, 2019Frank Articles Facebook, privacy, tracking, Zuckerberg

March 8, 2019

By FRANK BAJAK

At first glance, Mark Zuckerberg’s new ”privacy-focused vision ” for Facebook looks like a transformative mission statement from a CEO under pressure to reverse years of battering over its surveillance practices and privacy failures.

But critics say the announcement obscures Facebook’s deeper motivations: To expand lucrative new commercial services, continue monopolizing the attention of users, develop new data sources to track people and frustrate regulators who might be eyeing a breakup of the social-media behemoth.

Facebook “wants to be the operating system of our lives,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of media studies at the University of Virginia.

Zuckerberg’s plan, outlined Wednesday, expands Facebook’s commitment to private messaging, in sharp contrast with his traditional focus on public sharing. Facebook would combine its instant-messaging services WhatsApp and Instagram Direct with its core Messenger app so that users of one could message people on the others, and would expand the use of encrypted messaging to keep outsiders — including Facebook — from reading the messages.

The plan also calls for using those messaging services to expand Facebook’s role in e-commerce and payments. A Facebook spokesperson later said it was too early to answer detailed questions about the company’s messaging plans.

Vaidhyanathan said Zuckerberg wants people to abandon competing, person-to-person forms of communication such as email, texting and Apple’s iMessage in order to “do everything through a Facebook product.” The end goal could be transform Facebook into a service like the Chinese app WeChat , which has 1.1 billion users and includes the world’s most popular person-to-person online payment system.