A board member for a self-styled “disinformation” tracking group that seeks to “defund” and shut down conservative news outlets is being “forced out” of a senior role at Harvard University.
Joan Donovan is on the board of the Check My Ads Institute, a nonprofit group pressuring advertisers to cut ties with right-leaning websites that are purportedly peddlers of disinformation, according to its website. Earlier this month, multiple reports surfaced detailing how Donovan is being forced out by the Harvard Kennedy School from her “misinformation” research director role at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.
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“I would not describe Joan Donovan as an academic but, rather, a political activist who has done agenda-driven work since she went to the Shorenstein Center,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, a group seeking to “uphold the standards of a liberal arts education,” told the Washington Examiner.
“What it tells me that she is one-quarter of the board of Check My Ads is that it is not a serious organization but, rather, a partisan outfit,” he added. “Donovan is a liar and a very poor scholar, if she’s any kind of scholar at all, and a political agent.”
Check My Ads was co-founded by Nandini Jammi, who previously helped launch a group called Sleeping Giants that waged a successful campaign pressuring advertisers to defund Breitbart. Its other co-founder is Clare Atkin, who, like Jammi, is an adviser to Good Information, a Democratic strategist-run operation that owns websites critics allege are overly partisan and posing as local news outlets.
It’s unclear who or what funds Check My Ads. The group did not reply to a Washington Examiner request for this information but did forward a copy of its Form 990-N tax filing covering a period between January and December of 2021 — its first fiscal year. Check My Ads disclosed on the form that its “gross receipts are normally $50,000 or less.”
“We don’t take money from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple or Amazon,” according to Check My Ads’s website. “We’re supported by grants and our Checkmates.”
Donovan, the Check My Ads board member, was a research lead between 2016 and 2018 at the Data and Society Research Institute, a left-of-center think tank that has been slammed for promoting censorship, according to her LinkedIn profile. The institute has received funding from Arabella Advisors, a dark money consulting firm that manages nonprofit organizations that, in turn, oversee other entities that don’t file tax forms with the IRS.
The board member made national headlines in February following a bombshell report by the Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper affiliated with the university, outlining how Harvard is forcing Donovan out by summer 2024 from her role heading up the Technology and Social Change Project.
Donovan’s project at Harvard has published research on alleged “disinformation” and “misinformation” in connection to COVID-19 and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — among other subjects. While it’s unclear why Harvard decided to shutter her project, Donovan has clashed with her Harvard colleagues on the topic of content moderation on social media, according to Semafor.
She delivered an October 2021 presentation dubbed “Curbing the Damage Caused by Misinformation” to supporters of the Kennedy School, resulting in Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s ex-policy head, questioning why Donovan should be the arbiter of truth, according to the outlet.
Donovan, whom Democrats have championed as a purported expert on the spread of alleged disinformation, has also discredited the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s infamous abandoned laptop. She tweeted in April 2022 that published content based on the laptop is a “straw man.”
During a Harvard Kennedy School podcast published on the day of the 2020 presidential election, she more overtly questioned the laptop’s legitimacy, Fox News reported.
“The sourcing of the laptop being dropped off in Delaware at a lonely repairman’s shop that’s just — if you can charge $85 for fixing a broken laptop, I want to know you,” Donovan said. “It’s a broken laptop, right? So, the sourcing of it just stinks of tradecraft. It stinks of a drop. And many cybersecurity professionals are waiting for an opportunity to forensically analyze the contents of this hard drive.”
“What we see as researchers when they’re trying to make a story happen time and time again, and it doesn’t, then you start to see the intensification and adaptation of tactics,” she said on the podcast. “So, we pretty much expected more and different styles of attack, including a leak, but was really suspicious of it, is you’ve got someone with millions of dollars. He can’t afford Geek Squad at Best Buy to come to his house for the laptop that he’s evidence of crimes on? I mean, it’s really hard to believe.”
In December 2022, Donovan also authored a Politico op-ed that claimed the “Twitter Files,” sets of documents being released from Jack Dorsey’s time as CEO of Twitter, “are a desperate attempt to legitimize a well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop from hell’ proved collusion between the so-called deep state and social media companies.”
L. Brent Bozell III, founder and president of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, told the Washington Examiner that it is clear Donovan is in no position to “make a call” about what is disinformation or not.
“We find on a regular basis that fact-checkers or social media companies, like Facebook, or advisory boards they put together don’t know what they’re talking about,” Bozell said.
Check My Ads, which bills itself as “adtech’s first watchdog,” has taken credit for getting conservative radio show host Dan Bongino dropped from Google’s ad service. It’s unclear whether or not Check My Ads, like other self-styled “disinformation” monitors, compiles a secret blacklist of conservative websites that it feeds to ad companies.
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Donovan did not reply to a request for comment.
“Harvard Kennedy School is committed to the teaching and study of misinformation and disinformation, and several faculty members are leading significant projects that address these topics,” a Harvard Kennedy School spokesman told the Washington Examiner. “The Technology and Social Change Project is winding down, through an extended transition, because it does not have academic leadership by a full HKS faculty member, as required of all long-term research and outreach projects at HKS.”
