Misinformation ‘Expert’ Exposed as Left-Wing Activist

Professor Joan Donovan is frequently wheeled out by the New York Times as an ‘expert’ on misinformation across a whole range of fields. Paul Thacker at the Disinformation Chronicle exposes her as a shoddy Left-wing activist with a fancy title. Here’s an excerpt.

A funny thing happened when the New York Times reported a month back that Elon Musk’s exit from DC politics had been facilitated by a group of activists targeting his electric car company after he abandoned Democrats, helped fund Trump’s election and then ran DOGE.

In short, Musk supports zero Democratic Party politicians and none of their priorities.

Enter Democratic activists who protested against the company run by the party’s main boogey man — protests that sometimes veered into violence and started at the impetus of sociology professor Joan Donovan. Here’s the Times report:

The problem with Times story is what the Times journalist doesn’t tell us, namely the function professor Joan Donovan has served at the New York Times and other legacy news. Labeling Donovan a “sociology professor at Boston University” skips over this purported academic’s role as a central character in the Times’s fake narrative that America is awash in ‘disinformation’ that can only be fixed by legacy media and professors, like Joan Donovan — a misinformation authority who allegedly publishes objective scholarship with neutral, verified facts and reliable truths.

“Dr Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation and disinformation campaigns,” explains one news site. “She conducts research, develops methods and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists and civil society organisations on how to detect, document and debunk media manipulation campaigns.”

In reality, the entire arena of disinformation studies has been exposed as a jobs programme for liberal activists who dress up in academic garb, to provide quotes to the Times when it runs articles claiming anything not published in the New York Times might be disinformation. Here’s just a few examples:

• August 2017 – Times quotes Donovan as “a scholar of media manipulation and Right-wing extremism” commenting on a White supremacist rally;
• March 2019 – Times labelled Donovan a “disinformation and media manipulation” and vaccine expert;
• May 2019 – Times quotes Donovan as “expert on misinformation” and “misleading abortion-related ads”;
• Dec 2019 – Times platforms Donovan as expert on political campaigns, who offers this advice: “Politicians must play some defence by understanding what information is out there that may be manipulated.”

Donovan was in hot demand throughout 2020 as a quotable expert to anchor New York Times stories on alleged rampant disinformation (spread only by conservatives and Trump supporters, of course):

• January 2020 – Times relies on Donovan as expert voice discussing “how misleading information spreads in the age of social media”;
• April 2020 – Times labels Donovan “researcher who studies disinformation and online extremism” pontificating on the finances of online streamers;
• May 2020 – Times platforms Donovan as a professor quibbling over what world leaders should be allowed to post on social media;
• April 2020 – Times promotes Donovan as voice of reason on conservative social media;
• July 2020 – Times reporters needed Donovan’s expertise as a scholar on “the terrifying results of unchecked medical misinformation”;
• August 2020 – Times allowed Donovan to pontificate on “conspiracy theorists who have operated in the darkest corners of the internet”;
• September 2020 – Times reached out to Donovan for a story on child trafficking as an expert “who studies online extremism and disinformation campaigns”;
• October 2020 – Times quotes Donovan for article commenting on election misinformation and threats to the very democracy of America, followed by another story on election day “disinformation” some days later;
• After 2020, Donovan posed in the Times as an expert on militias and far-Right Trump supporters, pontificated on media outlets whose politics doesn’t align with her own; and imparted strategic advice on the war in Ukraine.

However, Professor Donovan’s sparkly ‘scholarly’ judgements tend to dull and tarnish under history’s harsh light, a common occurrence among her fellow ‘disinformation experts’. …

I could document other examples of Donovan’s academic musings running uncontrollably like a Southern California wildfire throughout the media before falling apart upon closer inspection, but what’s the point? Her fellow ‘disinformation academics’ have a similar spotty history, including Renee DiResta (the disinformation ‘hobbyist’ bounced from Stanford, now at Georgetown, who seems to have lied about her own history of spreading election disinformation); and Brown University’s Claire Wardle (who once claimed Covid vaccine mandates were a “conspiracy” and then pivoted to defend those same Covid vaccine mandates once President Biden implemented them).

None of these academics retain their former credibility. Last summer, the Chronicle of Higher Education eviscerated Joan Donovan in an investigation that ran to almost 11,000 words, with several of her former Harvard colleagues correcting her fibs and mischaracterisations, calling out poor research habits and noting a chronic pattern of making unhinged accusations that lack evidence.

Worth reading in full.