How Big Tech is buying influence in academia
Last May, several of Big Tech’s wealthiest and most powerful movers and shakers signed a very short statement that read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
I am no fan of extinction, pandemics or nuclear war, but the letter was a real eyebrow-raiser, mostly because the companies that these guys (and indeed, most of them are guys) help run focus on profits, not the public interest. Its self-aggrandizing tone also had the effect of drawing attention to their concerns and away from a whole class of scholars and researchers who have dedicated their careers to identifying the risks and biases of new technologies. If you’re really worried about the big harms of artificial intelligence, listen to these people, not the tech titans.
One especially bright beacon among them is Joan Donovan, who is behind some of the most incisive, insightful research into how disinformation and extremism spread on social media. Donovan is a pioneer in the field and saw things like the emergence of the far right online and Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign to delegitimize the 2020 presidential election results coming long before most other folks did. If you understand that viral disinformation on social media has become a serious threat to democracy, her research has probably floated across your screen at some point. Consider sending her a thank-you note. Especially now.
Donovan was leading a flagship research project on these issues at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government until this past summer, when she suddenly disappeared from the website and took a professorship at Boston University. She remained uncharacteristically quiet about what had happened at Harvard until this week, when she filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Department of Education and the Massachusetts attorney general’s office against Harvard. Donovan alleged that the university pushed her out to protect the interests of Meta, after the family foundation of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard, pledged to give $500 million to the university in December 2021. The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, reported this was its largest donation of all time. What was the donation for? To establish a university-wide center for studying AI.