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.
And just like that, I lost a lot of trust on Harvard.
Harvard is where they got caught taking money from the sugar lobby and put out a paper pointing away from sugar as a leading cause of heart disease and towards saturated fat. This changed health policy in America, killing who knows how many.
Harvard has deserved no credibility for longer than we’ve been alive.
I never really trust institutions that put money above all else.
Not sure why people think colleges are exempt from scummy behavior. They’re a business, not a charity lol.
Most colleges are non-profits, which means they are supposed to be, ya know, not profit seekers. Harvard, like many others, is not a business.
You’re beyond delusional if you think people aren’t profiting at harvard.
Okay. Lol.
I didn’t go to college at all after high school because I think universities are a scam.
The US implementation of University Education is prone to scams.
The actual concept of higher education to train people to have certain highly complex expertises necessary for high value added industries is not a scam, as the facts on the ground make clear: it’s not by chance that even in the ultra-Capitalist United States companies in advanced areas such as Tech hire lots of university graduates with degrees applicable for those areas, rather than go for the much more abundant and hence cheaper people with just high-school which would yield them bigger profits if the university degrees in those areas did not justify the higher cost of hiring those with such degrees (in fact you’ll notice them trying to contain manpower costs by hiring foreigners with such degrees, but not by hiring high-school graduates)
Ultimatelly your own educational choice was good or bad depending on which university degrees were available in the area for which you have a knack (and indeed in certain areas there really is no point in higher education) and how much would it would cost you: many degrees are effectivelly worthless, many more are not worth the cost in work-experience years lost whilst taking that degree and quite a lot are not worth the monetary cost charged by US universities for them, but some are still worth it even at the ridiculously high cost of getting a degree in the US.
In summary, if you meant that all higher education is a scam, that’s a ridiculous generaliszation that goes against observable reality, but if you meant that some (maybe even most) university education in the US is a scam, I agree with you.
I’m in the US, so yes, most universities here are a scam.
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.
Good for you?
Colleges don’t have external investors or are technically “owned” in the same way a business is. But they do functionally operate in the same way as profit based institutions. This is because the people who run them understand that industry connections can be immensely profitable. You help fudge some numbers or put out dubious research backing a particular industry and you might find yourself in a position in which you get paid to “consult” for those companies later on.
You’re right, it’s a real estate trust.
Can i have some of what youre smoking? Reality is too real today