A nationally recognized online disinformation researcher has accused Harvard University of shutting down the project she led to protect its relationship with mega-donor and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The allegations, made by Dr. Joan Donovan, raise questions about the influence the tech giant might have over seemingly independent research. Facebook’s parent company Meta has long sought to defend itself against research that implicates it in harming society: from the proliferation of election disinformation to creating addictive habits in children. Details of the disclosure were first reported by The Washington Post.
Beginning in 2018, Donovan worked for the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and ran its Technology and Social Change Research Project, where she led studies of media manipulation campaigns. But last year Harvard informed Donovan it was shutting the project down, Donovan claims.
Well, in that sense I was lucky to have been born in a Western nation where society values Education highly and were the State actually serves people not “business” (at least back then, it’s worse now) so all I had to do was have high enough grades in the relevant areas in high-school and in my Physics and Maths entrance exams to get 5 years of Science and Engineering higher education pretty much for free.
I suspect that, given my low income origins, had I been born in the US or even UK (were universities are also expensive and access is nowhere as meritocratic as my own country), given my natural propention the top range of my professional qualifications would’ve ended up as Car Mechanic or maybe Hacker, rather than Engineer.
I wish it was more like that everywhere: people should all have the opportunity to be all they can be.
I ended up involved in a leftwing political party when I lived in the UK because I concluded that local kids with the same kind of origin and skills like me over there had nowhere the same opportunities I was lucky to have, whilst the well-connected children of the upper classes had a veritable red-carpet all their lifes, no merit whatsoever required - and that shit really goes against all my principles when it comes to fairness.
Mind you, Hell would freeze over before a party following the principle of Equal Opportunity got power in the UK, so me putting some effort into helping a small leftwing party there was hopeless from the start, but I did it anyway.
