Harvard, Meta, and veritas

From The Washington Post (gift link):

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.

The detail that really got me:

Donovan says in her complaint that [Harvard Kennedy School dean Doug] Elmendorf emailed her after the October donors’ meeting and asked to discuss her Facebook work and “focus on a few key issues drawn from the questions raised by the Dean’s Council and my own limited reading of current events.”

He wrote that he wanted to hear from her about “How you define the problem of misinformation for both analysis and possible responses (algorithm-adjusting or policymaking) when there is no independent arbiter of truth (in this country or others) and constitutional protections of speech (in some countries)?”

Donovan said in the filing that Elmendorf’s use of the phrase “arbiters of truth” alarmed her because Facebook uses the same words to explain its reluctance to take actions against false content.

That there is “no independent arbiter of truth” doesn’t mean that there are no arbiters, no facts. I like what Robert Caro says about facts and truth.

Harvard’s motto, of course, is veritas. It’s everywhere on the campus.

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June 11, 2024: At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephanie M. Lee revisits this story: “Is This Famous Misinformation Expert Spreading Misinformation?” An excerpt:

Here was a narrative with the kernels of some undeniable truths. Meta does funnel money into higher ed; Harvard is cozy with the 1 percent. But a believable story is not necessarily a true one. Donovan presented no firsthand evidence that Meta was behind her ouster. And when I tried to get to the bottom of what actually happened at Harvard, a different narrative emerged from interviews, documents, recordings, texts, and emails.