Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/up...
To sum up the first few pages after skimming it, Facebook tried to bribe her (well "fund" her research), she refused. Later she had a meeting with the former head of comms at Facebook, who was now on the Dean's council, where he became incredibly angry with her research (page 4, 13). Following this, she got an email from the Dean of the Kennedy school which sounds very much like someone tattled to them and they now want to "review" her research (see page 5, 15). It continues from here.
She strongly believes in increased content moderation by "fact checkers".
She's spread misinformation herself like
- Suggesting Russian disinformation on Facebook shifted the 2016 election (anyone who's run a facebook ad in their life knows how absurdly ridiculous this is)
- Advocating for increased censorship of information during COVID on lab leak hypothesis
This is just off a few minutes of reading her past work.
I'm not a fan of Facebook (in the slightest) but also am really not a fan of the type of censorship this person wants.
It looks like the FB Archive project gains momentum and launches but Dr. Donovan and the TASC get sidelined along the way (which understandably is very upsetting, you can feel the pain on every page). It does seem clear that the Dean doesn't approve of Dr. Donovan/TASC and he eventually shuts the group down, but if he allows the Facebook project to move forward under other groups that are also within the Kennedy school, then the title of this post is pretty misleading. (Oh, maybe why the actual article title says "initial team" instead of just "team".)
BTW, not a particular fan of Meta, no feelings about Harvard/Kennedy school, never heard of any of these people before except Frances Haugen and Dr. Latanya Sweeney.
this is described dismissively and in the passive voice, but it's an active action, and quite damning.
who sidelined them, and why?
it seems the answers are: the school, because the researchers upset facebook, who was giving the school money
> if he allows the Facebook project to move forward under other groups that are also within the Kennedy school, then the title of this post is pretty misleading
this is misleading: if the research is allowed to continue, it should continue under the researchers who did the research, unless there's a good reason otherwise
This is the entire crux of the issue; do they have a problem with the lead researcher because she isn't good at her job or because she is finding things that their large donor doesn't like?
* - The researcher being removed without any good cause evident
If they are forcing funding by Facebook/Meta, then that does seem like a conflict of interest, but is a quite a different headline.
Is there someone continuing it that I missed?
I think Dr. Donovan's complaint is not that it didn't happen, so much as she was not allowed to play a larger role in it despite having the desire, the people, the funding, and the right--as the person who came up with the idea and the person who provided the material, without which there would be no project. (And then worse, history rewritten to exclude her contributions)
Who remains at the university doing the research halted by the dismissal* of the lead researcher?
* – whether overtly or via constructive dismissal
Move forward in the direction the dean and Facebook want, or in the direction the original team wanted to explore?
Because it doesn't seem - at all - that the two are equivalent. And it is not misleading to call out replacing a non-bribe-able PI with a susceptible or even already bribed one.
> I chose to work with Dr. Sweeney because she was the shoulder I leaned on when I needed to decode the politics of HKS. I regard Dr. Sweeney to be brilliant at computer science, the foremost authority on privacy in technology, and had a vision to build the FB Archive on the base of a data sharing platform that she had designed previously.
Donovan's vision was to build "a searchable archive of these documents for the public interest" and hold training workshops for other researchers. So Dr. Sweeney's lab built it, as was the plan; and held training workshops, which was a little hurtful to Donovan as she was not invited into that process.
After the fact, Sweeney summed up her view of their respective contributions in a private email to Donovan:
> The technological IP (design, architecture, and implementation) in FBarchive belongs to the Lab [i.e. Sweeney] alone. No one can claim IP over the original content of course, but the Lab also has IP in the redaction strategy used. Your team contributed the citation reference used to identify each image and document, and of course, you were part of the original concept. This is the kind of details that we will document on the history page.
And implies, like it's not even worth asserting directly, that TASC's contributions are historical, not current. A couple of responses later, Donovan says:
> TASC made many contributions including getting the documents and categorizing them, as well as promoting the archive in public forums, and having my team write testimonies and 1pagers, reviewing abstracts and holding office hours with students and so many meetings.
Dr. Donovan's complaints with the project as delivered seem to mostly NOT be that she wanted it to be different than it was, but rather, that the history page contains blatant lies that minimize Dr. Donovan and TASC's contributions. And also that it is incredibly unjust that she brought this highly valuable asset to the table, and without cause was not only shut out, but basically fired, and her historical contributions scrubbed. (Section 42.)
(To be clear, this is a sad and frustrating tale and if I was Donovan I'd be pissed too.)
When some activists at that meeting said they felt that their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, "You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States."
I don't work in PR, the issues I am politically active over are very local. This researcher paints a big target on her back, in an issue as amply documented as an academic firing, it isn't surprising that things are not cut and dried.
I had a close friend who did undergraduate research in a fisheries department.
They had been researching plant selection for aquaponics to increase the yield of tilapia. They had a filtration system that pushed tank water through a bed of plant roots. The plants would be harvested, processed into fish food, and fed back to the fish. On top of this platform, they'd experiment with different plant combinations to measure the impact on water quality and protein conversion.
They were seeing very high protein conversion with their plant choices (numbers high enough they gave me pause at what it would mean for society, but if I tried to throw out a number now I'd certainly get it wrong).
Recycling energy like this reduced the amount of food you'd have to put into the system, and the plants handled a good portion of the filtration for the system.
At some point, a large agriculture business with strong ties to the department offered a large grant that was understood to be contingent on this project being discontinued.
The project was abandoned and my buddy dropped out of his degree program.
Superficially, focus on driving down net waste in the system.
Take the nutrient profile of tilapia waste. Compare that with the nutrient demands of plants to find candidates. Then look for plants where the majority of the biomass can be converted into food that the tilapia can digest (i.e. edible roots, stalks, leaves; the more the fish can eat the less energy you take out of the system).
IIRC at least one of the plant choices had a tuber.
IIRC there is also something about the efficiency of waste->biomass conversion for the plants at different stages of development; figuring out when the ideal time to harvest is to minimize energy loss.
It’s saying that this is a case of academic innovation, and that that is startup drama.
Corporations and wealthy donors don't give money while expecting nothing in return.
People tend to assume all 501(c)(3)/nonproft and "public charity" are synonymous, but they aren't and that can make discussions like this confusing.
It sounds like you mean public charities have stricter rules. I find the opposite to be true. There are additional rules and reporting requirements that apply only to private foundations because of the limited funding and tight control of such organizations by a close-knit group of people.
> https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/eo-operational-req...
The rules are different, so which you view as more restrictive dependa on your perspective.
In this case, the context is discussion of this claim:
> I thought the tax-benefits of a non-profit were supposed to be tied to some governance requirements and operating in pursuit of some mission other than profit
Thr greater tax benefits of public charities are indeed tied to governance requirements (specifically rules that restrict the board makeup of public charities) and mission alignment.
Random people like you and me wouldn't pay for something they're gonna use twice in their lifetime, and lawyers surely have something like this, possibly integrate with all the other tools they use.
Not a lawyer and not familiar with their systems but based on my knowledge of other industries I’d say it’s not guaranteed they have a solution.
Could be good ol sticky notes and manual calendar events.
> based on my knowledge of other industries
:)
I might not be aware of other services though so if anyone is – please enlighten me!
Speaking to my AI: "computer, please create me a Google Doc that gets updated with new results related to the legal case of Joan Donovan vs Harvard, and notify me via email with updates."
I'd probably do something like that a few times a week. It's really a missing link to my news experience.
[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en
They might try to call and email you though.
There are plenty of mailing list services that associates of large law firms sign up for. I haven't been around people in that world for a while so I don't know the names, but I'm sure you can find them if you spend time looking.
Sounds like something that anyone claiming to practice Journalism should be doing already.
I have not read her filing, or followed her specific research, so I have no opinion about the possible merits or conspiracy theories regarding winding down her project. But, that statement by Harvard is suspicious. You take someone who is high profile, doing their own research, and offer them basically an insulting part time job (sorry to my adjunct lecturer friends, you know what I mean) and say "well, we didn't fire her, it was her choice." It would be like having a Director level position at a company, and being told your department was shutting down, but you could stay on as a part time contractor if you want. You just soft-fired her and tried to give yourself cover.
this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too, the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit... old money donates the new library and "hopes" for the best
That's the entire point and feature of these elite institutions (more specifically, their undergraduate division and business schools), to connect wealth with brilliant people. They are the traditional social institutions of innovation and entrepreneurship before incubators like YC were a thing. If you remove the wealth aspects, then the Ivies are no different than any other research state school.
Aside from their football programs, none of these other schools have gotten as comfortable with looking the other way for The Greater Good.
I think you meant "people who'd like to join the wealthy ones, or maybe already have."
Harvard, breaking rules for people donating new buildings?! Surely not Harvard.
they weren't rich enough to use the route that they used.
New money means wealth that was mostly based on efforts (not due to passive investments) by the current holder.
micromacrofoot1 was trying to distinguish “a lot of money” from “a little bit of money”, but old money is not the correct term for that.
From Wikipedia, the varsity blues scandal was about 33 sets of parents paying ~$25M total. That is chump change compared to donating a whole building, which new or old money can do, because they would have access to tens of millions of dollars.
there's also some behavior involved, traditionally it would be a major social faux pas to ask for special treatment in a traceable way
I'm quite sure Old Money would disagree with your definition of Old Money.
Not being the devil's advocate here, but "online disinformation" is not a credentialed field. That's like calling yourself a "truth expert".
Also the prestigious part is bogus at best. If they are then they sure don't make the headlines often.
Basically Media Matters juiced the X algorithm to give them less than 10 impressions of big ad spend clients ads next to anti-semitic comments they entered on their own sock puppet accounts (with few or little followers), then passed that contrivance off as truth, stating brand-destroying anti-semitic content is rampant on X. Where are the disinformation experts now decrying MM's bullshit? Where will they be in 30-36 months after X sues MM into oblivion? Hint: likely silent at their desks. Just as they have been over numerous lies targeting non-liberal narrative-busting realities.
This problem is not US centric. Every western country has developed these people like a rash. Universities are overflowing with left wing radicals who spend their time on activism instead of research, the only thing that's new is the tactic of claiming to be fact checkers. It's really hard to feel sorry for the firing of someone who should never have had a job in the first place.
It sounds like your view is that no one can be an expert on disinformation because some topics are disputed. That's an "interesting" take. I guess that reasoning would leave pretty few experts in the world.
Experts are often self appointed as well. If I was to declare myself an expert in an obscure area you don't understand by making wild claims that sound plausible it would be hard to say I wasn't and if some peers accepted it it would be even harder to deny it.
An expert shouldn't be self appointed and if nobody trustworthy calls someone an expert they shouldn't be considered one too. If you consider someone an expert on your own by their knowledge it's different.
Other than the fact that "disinformation expert" is a fake expertise invented to facilitate fallacious appeal to authority in the void left by a distrusted press:
There are two answers to your question.
First, everyone attempts to derive the truth from imperfect information and therefore is a "disinformation expert".
There's no consistently guaranteed information access that makes any one person consistently an expert above most others, including Joe at his coffee table.
That type of access and divulsion used to be assumed of the MSM. They destroyed their trust, and so now "disinformation experts" demand that trust. Broadley speaking, they won't get it. And they shouldn't.
The second reason is that comprehensive presentation of any truthful information requires a presentation of all facts regarding it. Aside from the most mundane fact checking tasks, I've broadley observed "fact checkers" disseminating disinformation as much as the MSM does. Whether the method is lying by ommission or another.
There was also experts on lobotomy who won Nobel Prices. All of whom were assumed to be truthful and knowledgeable and yet was disinformation in its own right.
And it really is late stage civ stuff. Journalists are supposed to be the "disinformation experts". This has always been a false narrative, but in recent years the public percieves enough deception from he Press that trust in their proclamations has fallen through the floor. Enter "disinformation experts" as a cheap last-ditch attempt at an appeal to authority fallacy by the same distrusted media. It will and is failing as well. As it should.
She's basically the Francis Crick of declaring Facebook memes not entirely true.
Links can be "discovered" ad infinitum.
Democratic election politics being a public trust game, at their core.
“The invisible hand” Adam Smith refers to are the unintended consequences from merchants’ want to keep their capital: increasing the domestic capital stock and enhancing military power for the state, i.e. protectionism etc.
More broadly and lately it refers to any unintended societal consequences from the free market.
Consequently it never means “finding a good price” which 99% of everyone using the term seems to believe.
I don't agree that bribes can't have unintended social consequences. They do have specific goals, yes. But some unintended consequences of bribery would be things like discouraging honest participants, or encouraging the most corrupt people (rather than the best, on merit) to place themselves in positions of authority, so as to get bribes. All of these are unintended in the sense that neither the person giving the bribe nor the person taking the bribe are trying to bring them about per se, they're only thinking about the immediate consequences (I get what I want).
Arguments "can be made" for anything. That is the worst possible justification for any position.
Corruption cannot be stopped without effort. The rules and institutions that regulate and control the market are that "effort".
When bribery happens in a country with a command economy, do you still say "there's that invisible hand of capitalism again"?
Bribery is not connected to a free market per se, but bribery in a free market is still a problem to be solved in the context of that free market.
Yes of course. I don't know why you keep suggesting I am against that. My issue is with the nonsensical attempts to tie bribery to capitalism, as if one is the result of the other.
This is totally unsurprising to most people who aren't directly benefitting from an unchallenged free market and it usually seems like the "invisible hand" is brought up as a bullshit argument by those already in power to justify accumulating more power, so it's a point of bitterness, hence the OP's sarcasm.
If you're looking for someone to criticize, you should look at your own behavior: "Fairly obvious, right?" an unsubstantive, smug, miserable response to my question, setting the tone for our interactions.
"This surprises you?!" Is a statement that contributes nothing. The occurrence of people doing wrong is not surprising, it is frequently shocking. The fallout when such people are caught out is worth noting.
1. https://checkmyads.org/about/
2. https://www.wired.com/story/you-purged-racists-from-your-web...
Here is their privacy statement (of the app that holds all your centralized data):
> MyDataCan may access, use, and disclose Your MDC Data as follows:
> To respond to subpoenas, court orders, or other legal process; in response to a request for cooperation from law enforcement or another government agency; to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding actual or suspected violations of our Terms of Service or this Privacy Statement, illegal activities, fraud, security or technical issues, misuse of the Platform or an App, or other misconduct, or to enforce our Terms of Service or this Privacy Statement; as otherwise may be required by applicable law; or to protect our rights, property, or safety or those of others.
Also they encrypt none of your data, and the only encryption function they have can encrypt your data only upon your explicit request after uploading it and only the data about yourself shared with you IN YOUR PERSONAL COPY OF THE DATA.
Also, they advertise
> providing access to technology and data for public interest research and development.
...
You would know this is typical modus operandi for Harvard.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/20/tech-billionaire-ai...
I wonder what the grand total spent was here? "PR expenses"
This can go either way, specially since the team and the project still exists, just without her.
For whatever reason though this is a controversial element, even though a change in the person's appearance would make a greater impact to their career than anything else. If it were okay to discuss, someone would have told the person by now.
On a lighter note, propaganda research is not a new field at all, even if it is being rebranded as disinformation studies. Noam Chomsky comes to mind.
I'm not saying I disagree with regulation related to massive donations but you need to check your numbers.
https://finance.harvard.edu/financial-overview
"Total operating expenses increased by $482 million or 9% to $5.9 billion."
Are you trying to say a school should always lose money? Or that they should always spend exactly as much as they earn?
Either way, it cost Harvard way more than $500 million to operate for a year.
Take a look over the law faculty and you'll find famed Jeffrey Epstein defender and hospitality enjoyer Alan Dershowtiz [3] but it's OK, he kept his underwear on while getting a massage [4].
Epstein himself bought influence at Harvard and even had his own office there [5].
As for the whistleblower claims, they might be true. I wouldn't be surprised. Never forget though that you're only hearing one side. Would Mark Zuckerberg really spend $500 million to silence a study where the researcher could no doubt walk out and find someone to fund it without too much trouble?
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/09/harvard-president-c...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/11/09/harvar...
[3]: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/7/30/20746983/alan-dersh...
[4]: https://www.theroot.com/alan-dershowitz-sure-i-got-a-massage...
[5]: https://apnews.com/article/39cfba1a1ed7304d8aab32d63553eebd
But it isn't metric, it appears to be a perversion of roman numerals.
Even if what you say is true, which I do not grant, your implication is akin to "we should not punish criminals, because some other criminals will rise to take their place." It's a defeatist meme that mainly serves to protect the interests of the already-powerful.
Some work is never done, but that is not a reason to give up on it.
I hope you can see the ridiculousness is saying that corporations should be limited in wealth as well, but even if you can't, let's assume they are limited the same. Now it becomes easier to buy them off, because they are comparably smaller.
The only logical solution is to allow both corporations and individuals to accumulate as much wealth as they are able to. Rich people aren't the problem, corrupt people are. Instead of trying to make rich corrupt people less rich, why don't we try to make them less corrupt instead?
Of course doing something halfway would not accomplish much.
People - maybe. But why corporations? Isn’t that double taxation? The only way money leaves a corporation is through people which will be taxed eventually.
As for the healthcare system, it doesn’t need more money. It needs an extreme regulation and red tape shake up. We could have vastly better healthcare today for the same amount of money that’s already there if not for the bureaucratic mess and an army of administrators tending to it.
Double taxation already happens today.
> And it never will be. This is a human problem. No amount of laws and regulations will ever solve it.
Come on. Wealth is literally a creature of "law and regulations," and changes to them can definitely "solve it." That's trivially shown by the through a thought experiment where we imagine legal changes that lead to Zuckerberg having his wealth confiscated and Facebook being placed under the control of some person or entity who is not its ally and is not allowed to profit from it.
I think I need to make extra-clear that my example is an extreme one to clearly disprove your point, not the only regulatory option available or a policy proposal. Don't get distracted by irrelevant details.
Defeatist memes like what you said circulate widely to encourage paralysis, but they're propaganda or its derivatives, not truth.
Without laws you don't have anarchy, you just have rule of strongest. Anarchy can have laws but no authority that enforces them.
Huh? Maybe in the deep, deep past; but definitely not now. Even back then, where there were no states and little social organization, there was still custom within groups that worked like law.
> Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
Zuckerberg and Facebook have no army and no means to raise one, despite the wealth they have. They are totally, utterly at the mercy of laws and regulations.
Clearly there are plenty of extreme "solutions".
I interpret GP's point being an attempt to provide their insight into human condition, which is an interesting one.
Is graft a necessary condition of human civilization?
We don’t solve spectrum problems, we reduce and minimize them. Just because they exist to a degree and never are remediated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to minimize them.
Corruption can lead to tax evasion, poor tax administration, and exemptions that disproportionately favor the well-connected and wealthy population groups in society and must be rallied against if we seek civil societies.
We’ll never get rid of it. As you say. But if we don’t act against it these problems will grow like cancer and become insidious, infecting every aspect of society, so it’s deeply important not to embrace an apathetic approach or present them as inevitable.
They are intrinsic, but the level we tolerate — the “degree of corruption” — which I would argue is pretty high in this case, is most certainly counterable and definitely can be reduced.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property....Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise"[0].
0. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-08-02-0...
And the prisoner's dilemma is a way of exploring/explaining these traits (though I expect these aren't exclusive to humans).
Nice way to say nothing of substance.
(Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-student spending hasn't even increased at a pace equivalent to inflation; rather, funding didn't increase with enrolment, leading to students paying for an ever-higher share of their education.
(As for private universities... fine, I'm okay calling it price gouging.)
Generally Non-resident tuition is the cost it takes to educate a student. Resident tuition is cheaper because it's subsidized by the state. Every year we would get less and less funding from the state and would have to shift more burden to the student. We implemented furlough days, and cut admin staff compensation to attempt to reduce the tuition burden on students. We still had to raise Tuition faster than inflation in the end.
That's nearly a quarter million dollars, of which the professor is probably getting a few thousand. where is the other $200k+ going?
So yeah, not a lot of tuition is making it to the low rung teachers.
Legit ransomware.
What we have today is how a free market works. The invisible hand always tipping the scales. They would simply find a better way to get the outcome they want, avoiding the issue altogether (something at the federal level, make an example out of a researcher or institution, etc).
The word utopia is used a lot when anything other than capitalism is being talked about, but the free market, which is an integral part of it, definitely takes the win. We have so many "free economies" around demonstrating how much of an utopia this concept is.
I don't know what world you live in if you deem our current society as a perfect place. Maybe you're a billionaire?
Just coming from an assumption that you're an average HN reader, your answers to this question are radically different from what most of humanity would have answered before 20th century (first world) or the second half of 20th century.
It's better than before, sure. But an utopia? Not even close.
So... right, exactly what he said.
It's relative. You seem to be confusing "well" with "perfect". Depending on your point of view, no economic system is well functioning, because there will always be ebbs and flows where people clash with the system and it works better or worse at time. I'm not sure if our version of a free market in the U.S. is closer to well functioning or not, but I don't see a problem with pointing out how it can be better, and I'm not sure why you would respond with something I interpret as "don't bother, it can't be perfect", especially when you haven't presented a better alternative.
> What we have today is how a free market works. The invisible hand always tipping the scales. They would simply find a better way to get the outcome they want, avoiding the issue altogether (something at the federal level, make an example out of a researcher or institution, etc).
The counter to the invisible hand working against society instead of in tandem or for it is freely available information. In a free market economy, the answer is almost always more information because it allows individuals to act correctly, either through individual actions, or as a group through pressure on the government to regulate.
So yes, what we have today is how a free market operates (although I would argue not very efficiently, due to lots of blocks on information that exist), and this information we're discussing in this post coming out and people being able to respond to it is the first step in being able to act on it to curtail it in the future.
> The word utopia is used a lot when anything other than capitalism is being talked about, but the free market, which is an integral part of it, definitely takes the win. We have so many "free economies" around demonstrating how much of an utopia this concept is.
The only person here who said that is you, so I'm not sure what you're on about. I certainly don't think it's some utopia, just a system built on emergent behavior that like any other, needs special bounds and constant attention to both keep it functioning as well as possible as well as keep it from going completely off the rails.
That was not my intention. I simply had to point this out because your comment implied that a well functioning free market could somehow solve the issue. My take is that it can't, because there's no such thing.
Whether or not we should bother with improving it, is a matter for another debate. My take is that we've tried it for long enough, and small improvements simply don't work anymore. Millions of people need/want something and a small handful of powerful rich folks can deny that with no real recourse.
> The counter to the invisible hand working against society instead of in tandem or for it is freely available information.
I mostly agree! But that's, once again, an utopia. Key information is still kept from the public eyes and the trend is to get more restricted to the rich and powerful as time goes on.
As an example, a few key players like Google and Meta have information on virtually every single citizen in the world, while the public has absolutely no control over it or oversight on how that's used.
I don't fully agree because of another problem that we can see almost every day: even with information, the system is unable to make any meaningful change.
We have backroom deals exposed, corruption, quid-pro-quo everywhere, and yet the majority of the responsible people/companies remain free to keep doing those. At best we get a few scapegoats or slaps on the wrist. Information alone is useless if you either have nobody that can act on it (think unregulated markets, industries, etc), or the ones that are able to, can't or won't because of the existing power structures, like the example in the article.
> The only person here who said that is you
I was obviously alluding to the ever-present "communism/socialism is an utopia" argument. I never implied you said that specifically. It's just such a common argument that I assumed could be raised since I mentioned the word and I expanded on it.
I'm not sure that's true, or if that's just a prevailing emotion. Being true and feeling that way aren't the same thing. Presumably, if it's true, we can point towards examples of it, and try to quantify it.
If the answer is "no, we can't quantify it because the same people that cause it prevent us from knowing about it", well, that's an untestable assertion and very close to conspiracy theory territory, so I would push back on that, as I think anyone should. So hopefully there are some examples we can discuss.
> I mostly agree! But that's, once again, an utopia. Key information is still kept from the public eyes and the trend is to get more restricted to the rich and powerful as time goes on.
Except we're seeing the counter case right here, right now? Here we have what appears to be a case of Meta with their thumb on the scale, and then with their thumb on the scale again when they're investigated. Either soemthing comes about from this, or from similar stuff later on, or I'd be tempted to say most people just don't care.
To be clear, just because you and I care doesn't mean the average person does, and if the average person doesn't and that means nothing happens, that's not a failure of the system, that's it working as expected, as our minority opinion shouldn't necessarily override theirs, no matter how much we think we're right.
> As an example, a few key players like Google and Meta have information on virtually every single citizen in the world, while the public has absolutely no control over it or oversight on how that's used.
No, the public has absolute control, through petitioning for legislature and holding their representatives to account for acting, or not. Failure to exercise power is not the same as lack of power, even if it appears the same.
> even with information, the system is unable to make any meaningful change.
There are many changes that happen all the time, but the system is also slow, which in some ways is a feature and some ways a problem. Being slow to change means that rapidly changing events can take a while to be dealt with, but it also means that usually there's limited damage that a change in a detrimental direction can do before it's recognized and dealt with, because the changes often come in small steps.
> At best we get a few scapegoats or slaps on the wrist. Information alone is useless if you either have nobody that can act on it (think unregulated markets, industries, etc), or the ones that are able to, can't or won't because of the existing power structures, like the example in the article.
This article is the response to this problem. Harvard is ultimately responsible to the students that want to go there, the donors that donate, and the state and federal governments in which it resides and operates. Whether this results in a small loss in confidence in Harvard being able to carry out research objectively by those that pay attention, a large loss in confidence for the general public the public that Harvard can carry out research objectively and that affecting other research they do, or the federal government calling people in to investigate, we'll have to see. The latter seems unlikely, but I'm looking forward to there maybe being some increased scrutiny and coverage. It seems it's being covered by major outlets now, so congress getting interested isn't out of the question, given they've been fairly interested in this fairly recently.
> I was obviously alluding to the ever-present "communism/socialism is an utopia" argument.
I wouldn't claim a free market to be a utopia, and I wouldn't think someone espousing communism or socialism would in a discussion where they are expected to support their assertions, so I don't think it's particularly useful to introduce it to the conversation here. Without someone actually calling for it, it's just a straw man argument, whether against a person or a position, and whether against me or against the traditional counter to what I presented, I don't think it serves a useful purpose. I was confused enough by it's introduction that I honestly wasn't sure what the point was.
I never went after concrete examples because, like I said, that's a matter for another discussion. But we do have very easy to find examples with a very prevalent topic: climate change.
Protests, complaints, endless coverage of it and yet... no real change. Companies now paying "carbon offsets" that have been multiple times proven to be complete bullshit, targets for emission reduction keep getting postponed and so much more that we can absolutely quantify if we want to. But it simply won't happen because it's not profitable.
> Except we're seeing the counter case right here, right now?
I suppose you're hopeful this will actually result in something. I'm not so sure, unfortunately. Now it's news, in a week nobody will remember. In the end, let's no forget Meta got what they wanted: the research was stifled and now other researchers know: here lie dragons.
We have another gigantic example: Snowden literally imploded his life to get all that information out. We know so much more thanks to his sacrifice and yet what has changed? Do we now not worry that we're all spied on because this was exposed? Are we convinced the tech giants don't have backdoors to the government anymore?
Information is meaningless if we cannot act on it.
> if the average person doesn't and that means nothing happens, that's not a failure of the system, that's it working as expected
If the system is designed to allow corporations and governments to control the average person, ensuring they don't care about anything meaningful, that's a very, very bad system in my book.
Socrates had issues with how democracy was built exactly because it relies on the population being educated to work. If we simply ignore that - like we do today - we end up with our current situation: the majority of people don't care and the rich and powerful get to fuck them over for profit.
You keep everyone poor and dumb, and they'll worry about surviving. Never about climate change, corruption, privacy, etc.
I simply cannot comprehend how we as a society can look at this and say: that's working as expected and I'm fine with it. [insert "this is fine" dog picture]
> No, the public has absolute control, through petitioning for legislature and holding their representatives to account for acting, or not. Failure to exercise power is not the same as lack of power, even if it appears the same.
Sorry but I have to call bullshit here. The public cannot purchase lobbyists to legally bribe legislators to do whatever they want (including introducing legislation they provide to them). I can send thousands of emails to my representatives (or whatever other legal way of pressuring them) and it won't change anything. We've seen plenty of cases where even when the public does not agree with legislature, a few companies can still get what they want because they simply have much more power.
You are right in the sense that, if we did rebel, we could actually exercise our only real power. But voting and trying to convince politicians to "do the right thing" simply does not work. The system is not designed to work for the people, it's designed to work for whoever has power. At some point, the imbalance wasn't this great and we did use our power. But it was always through bloodshed and revolt that we got real change.
How many more outrageous bills have to pass despite public outcry to convince us that the system is broken?
> There are many changes that happen all the time, but the system is also slow, which in some ways is a feature and some ways a problem.
I can partially agree here. By nature of being slow it does in fact prevent some very bad decisions from happening over night. However we've seen with COVID and other recent events how that slowness can be literally the death of us.
There has to be flexibility when we require drastic changes and there simply isn't. As a result people keep dying - and many more will die - because it's simply not profitable to do what's necessary.
Ultimately it's not really the speed that's the issue though (although it worsens crises), but a complete misalignment on the objective. The system is built to increase profits, not to improve human life. Changes that improve human life are merely coincidences in pursuit of profit. So even if the system is slowly working, it's working towards a goal that's almost always orthogonal to what society needs.
Lastly, even though we clearly have very different views, I appreciate your thoughts and keeping it civil. I've had many of these conversations here where it devolved into personal attacks or worse, so: thank you.
It's difficult to fight this cognitive bias that, I think, we all carry—but we must.
Also learned behavior.
"Before society"? How many times have you seen someone argue that a particular action was morally wrong for no other reason than that it was illegal?
Today one can lie with much more impunity, at best tying things up in court for years until the person you lied to gives up, at worst being ordered by the court to make good on the promise and pay some legal costs (maybe).
As your synopsis shows, it's not prestige that forced integrity, it's the fact that others heard, and presumably would enforce such vows, even against a king, that forced integrity, even from a king.
The direct consequence of the king breaking his vow is "only" that the king loses his prestige. But the indirect consequences are severe; "king" is a position from which it is not safe to be removed.
Why taking bribes from tech giants is any different?
Veritas indeed.
I regret to inform you the number has gone up substantially since you last checked it
But they're not the same, these men. Only one of them really scares me. What scares me about Zuck is observable in his public behavior. He knows EXACTLY what he's doing and saying at all times. That's why when stuff like this comes out, you can be assured it was no coincidence, and you have to face the fact that he doesn't care.
This is how the USA has always been run, except in the past the billionaire class created the whole university to shape society. Like JD Rockefeller and the University of Chicago, which continues to have a profound political influence on the entire field of Economics.
It's absolutely pernicious and we normal people do need to fight it every way we can.
I agree with you that he is at best seemingly being indifferent, which is the same act as not caring; inaction is an act too; the origin story of TheFacebook lays a firm foundation for a continuation of similar behaviours even nearly two decades later.
If he hears about this - and he should if he's being caring, careful, and keeping his eye on the "empire"- and takes actions against this seeming cover up and suppression attempt, then that would bode well for him. That doesn't seem to fit into his character though, unlike Elon Musk standing up to the advertising industrial complex (and the parties it's aligned with who want to suppress truths and control the narrative) who very publicly will tell bad actors to go fuck themselves; "Hi Bob!"
I think or hope we're yet to see the consequences of controlling founders and boards of directors of these mammoth Fortune 500 companies that a small handful of individuals are wielding to control, whether solely for profit motive or evil, and arguably captured or corrupt institutions within the US government - of which the Twitter Files showed them working together to interfere with elections, suppress voices that countered the desired mainstream narrative talking points (propaganda) from top institutions from Harvard, etc.
The Nuremberg Code and punishment didn't exist prior to the Nuremberg Trials, where "I was just following orders" wasn't adequate justification, and it was concluded that "they should have known better."
The "power" and profits that come from these scalable systems are immense-unfathomable - and why you have to work from first principles, ethics as a foundation of that, to at least attempt to reduce and limit the externalized or collateral damage.
I personally believe the ad industrial complex needs to go, allowing people to be too cheaply-shallowly manipulated - where consumers are then paying a higher price for products and services to be manipulated; Tesla's vehicles would be ~6% more expensive if Tesla advertised - their success otherwise being attributed to mostly creating a good product that people wanted.
I've started to wonder if advertising being allowed in society should be considered a form of unnecessary-harmful inflation-inflammation, driving up prices, as well as lowering access to higher quality of products that everyone - as economies of scale for cheap products will not only them more readily available but also make better quality products more expensive due to lower quantities being in demand, etc.
But it's tricky because a high quality product that doesn't advertise could relatively quickly be surpassed by a low quality "good enough" product that's willing to advertise and flood the market with it, and trickier yet when it's an attention economy and reminding people you exist is part of the current competitive landscape especially for certain product types; the problem being people aren't accounting for to include the externalized costs - but where a simple mechanism of "don't buy from any brands that advertise" could counter all of that.
> I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive super-power.
there are absolutely kickbacks for people in control of those endowments choosing specific investment options with their many billions of dollars
They are solely focused on revenue. Teacher pay rarely raised, but that new upgrade for the stadium at a cool $120m, seems like a great idea.
FFS, her dept went past the paper budget for one semester, about 5 years ago. The resolution? Do without paper until the next semester.
That's what students insane tuition prices bought them. Apathy over education.
Awards and recognition for leaders. Where ethics rules are loose, fancy trips and steak dinners, etc.
There's an oversupply of most PhDs, so there's no need to raise their pay. And that's for professors. Grad students that teach are practically free.
Which PhDs are in undersupply?
She's still a full-time faculty member, has written/designed 3 courses for them, that are taught by herself and others to this day, and gets kudos every semester from students she's taught.
The college system is slightly less uncaring than the government. The big difference is the college system drains 20 years of your future income with insane pricing and if you get shit on due to THEIR changes, that's just your happy ass.
They are thorough in crushing dreams.
The best part about all of it? She got to PAY for the semesters that the school itself trashed.
Nothing, so they really didn't give 2 shits about it.
THATS universities, today.
Legal action is used even by unions to enforce their rights and contracts. If you don't have a union, legal action is the only strength a cog in the machine has. Use it, or get run over.
I'm not just writing out of my butt, I've successfully done this once. It is risky, but is it realistically any worse than what happened in this situation? It's not as if there's only one university awarding PhDs. And if you're swapping professors left and right, it's not as if staying at the university is really benefiting your original research goals.
When is there not a glut of administrators in any industry?
UCLA recently got hammered on this, after people shared a bunch of job posting for teaching posts for grad students with the disclaimer: "Note: this is an uncompensated position".
This doesn't have anything to do with universities specifically. There's always money for endeavors that have positive ROI. You can tell what a person, group, business or institution actually values by the things they spend money on that are true losses.
If it was laid out, that their education would suffer, because the resources that might be put towards it are now put into Sports Team, I suspect they would balk more.
The problem is many schools are now status symbols similar to an iPhone. People go to them precisely because other people cannot afford them. There are many schools that can provide a similar undergraduate experience - William and Mary for example - but simply do not have the cachet. The alumni, the students, professors and administration all want the prestige. It doesn't have to be that way if people would stop buying into the BS.
They already had reasons for people to attend without adding another 50k seats to a stadium that already had more than that.
This is a form of corruption that is present whenever anyone manages an investment fund, and not only specific to school endowments. This is why investment managers are licensed, and taking this kind of bribe could result in criminal penalties.
instead, I see a lot of demigods that rule their domain, curating complete autonomy as long as they stay within the confines they finessed
Let’s strike a committee to study it until it’s forgotten.
Edit: thanks lo_zamoyski. Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAFd4FdbJxs
I don't understand how did you get the impression that I was trying to be funny? It's a fairly serious description of the reality we live in.
It's actually how I often think of conspiracy. Not a bunch of men sitting in a room plotting together but a bunch of independent actors with convergent incentives. Also my litmus test for real bona fide conspiracy (Watergate or Contra Affair) vs crackpottery is if it can be boiled down to "wizards did it." It's always interesting that conspiracies work out to essentially making one feel safe in a world of all powerful but evil men rather than the discomfort of a chaotic world. Flat Earth stands out a bit because I still don't know who gains from it...
> I don't understand how did you get the impression that I was trying to be funny?
I didn't. I said Carlin was funny and that I was not. I honestly wasn't even aware you were referencing Carlin (at a direct level at least, since I did make the connection). It just reminded me of his statement (which now I understand as your intent. The subtle nod reference).
The litmus test is not about convergence, it is "wizards did it." Convergence is just a common kind of thing that crackpot conspiracies develop around. It's more rational when you understand convergence because crackpot conspiracy often is re-framed as a misinterpretation of the data.
Qualifiers are also important.
Hmm. Rather the comforting thought is in the mind of the so-called conspirators. Systemic theories about things like the Media (see mentioned Manufacturing Consent) get rejected as “conspiracies” because people (like in the Media) interpret it as saying that they, with full knowledge and intentionality are doing these things. Rather than that they are pawns in a larger system.
They are flattering themselves.
think your controversial head of state is being controlled by their buddies from university that run some private equity funds
well so would the other head of state if they won the election! different buddies
its more like if you dont also have a plan for outsized influence, then thats the biggest outlier and inefficient way of navigating the system we have
Imo, it's a good thing: regular ppl will be more suspicious about power overall and not make as many bad safety/convenience trades.
The right to read was literally only locked up a few hundred years ago.
It can be different than systems designed for the few instead of the many
However, even if you have two systems accountable to each other, once they realize that there's no third party that's holding the gestalt accountable, they're free to play tit-for-tat and essentially become a single entity.
It's kind of why "internal affairs" doesn't really work in police departments. They are part of the same system. If internal affairs clears the police, the police won't mess with internal affairs.
And I'm not saying there are easy solutions to implement. Because even if you have an entire web of systems configured in such a way that cooperation among some would be detrimental to the others so they would have incentives to keep each other in check, it would only take a sustained imbalance of power in order for the cooperators to neutralize the others so that they could create their own fiefdom.
But anywhere you do have a system that is only accountable to itself, you have a system that is likely rotting from the inside.
Insularity is both the strength and weakness of academia. Unfortunately, I feel we are sliding toward the worst of both worlds: an administrative "ruling class" that is insulated from consequences, but also allowed to constrain and control the educators/researchers.
There is some real case for institutionalization and being out of touch with the real world.
Add to that where those who can’t do but talk instead moving up in management to stand over the academics who are capable and immensely talented.
Bureaucracies anywhere they exist tend to lean this way, in their own special way. Whether it’s enterprise, healthcare, government, education..
Harvard et al also launder reputations, incubate reactionary movements, serve as a finishing school for the rich and powerful, stoke credentialing (eg grade inflation), and accelerate social inequity. For starters.
But you can give them to the birds and bees
I want money.
A bit of a dilemma in the karma sharing department as that feature is not yet implemented.
But seeing as how this story got 1,000 points in 2 hours in the original submission, it should probably be back on top.
——
E: More context here,
kick out the administrators, schooling would cost less without them
TL;DR if you believe that there is a (quoting Hillary Clinton) "vast right-wing conspiracy" that the govt, media, social media, and academia should be coordinated and marshalled to contain, you're on her side. She is the one who figured out that Jan 6th was "in favor of" Trump, see below. But the skullduggery may be of a more pure nefarious nature, she had a non faculty staff position and got fired, but she wants to be treated as an "academic" in the sense of the academic freedom that goes with professorships.
Here's her wikipedia page trimmed down to essentials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Donovan
Donovan's expertise is in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns
As Director, she published a number of impactful research papers and books.
Donovan co-wrote a widely-read study that discovered that a significant number of participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol were driven by their support for President Trump.
In September of the same year, Donovan released a book titled "Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America," which explores the spread of right-wing political conspiracy theories through online media.
Donovan earned her PhD in Sociology and Science Studies from UCSD, and was a postdoc at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA where her expertise was social movements, technology, and white supremacist's use of DNA ancestry tests.
She later held the role of Research Lead for the Media Manipulation Initiative at Data and Society, and mapped how interest groups, governments, political operatives, corporations, and others use the internet and media to disrupt social institutions.
Donovan went on to lead the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy School and teach the class Media Manipulation and Disinformation Campaigns.
She joined the Boston University College of Communication in September 2023 as a tenure-track assistant professor.
Donovan has authored over 35 articles, paper, and books [10] including:
How news organizations should cover white supremacist shootings, PBS NewsHour
Big Tech Companies Are Struggling With How To Best Police Their Platforms
Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives
Navigating the Tech Stack: When, Where and How Should we Moderate Content?
Toward a Militant Ethnography of Infrastructure: Cybercartographies of Order, Scale, and Scope across the Occupy Movement.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/joan-donovan-...">
1) Attract a lot of eyeballs
2) Sell ad space in front of those eyeballs
My paramount object in this struggle is to make a profit
and is not either to save or to destroy free speech.
If I could make a profit without promoting any free speech I would do it,
and if I could save it by promoting all free speech I would do it;
and if I could save it by promoting some free speech and forbidding other
free speech, I would also do that.
[1]http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley...
- Web hosting companies are attacked for hosting controversial speech all the time (AWS stopped hosting Parler when they were put on blast) - The infrastructure required for hosting large controversial websites can also be made unavailable to controversial sites (e.g CloudFlare dropping KiwiFarms citing its 'hateful user base') - Not to mention some platforms/people are literally de-banked, which apparently is a thing, and forced to use crypto for all expenses and revenue
Americans value freedom of speech, these are American companies. At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance with American values. I don't know the numbers but I would imagine it's a very small amount of America that isn't pro free speech.
At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society
according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold
the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance
with American values
At the end of the day, companies can and will decide what's profitable for them to do. If a hosting service doesn't want to host your site, you should probably speak in some other way. The internet is not the only vehicle for public communication. You and I should be completely free to say whatever we want. Nobody owes me (or you) a platform for speech. Those two statements are not incompatible. As I write this, I'm aware of the irony that I'm doing so on a public online forum. But I acknowledge at the end of the day if Hacker News wants to delete this comment, they have a right to do so.
All actions of government shape society. Tax break for charitable contributions? Laws permitting or forbidding certain medical procedures? Drawing lines for voting districts?
A completely laissez-faire attitude leads to landlords not renting apartments to people explicitly because of their skin color and blatant, explicit discrimination in hiring.
I don't want to live in that world.
I don't share your cynical view that people only behave with kindness because they are forced to at gunpoint. I also try to remember that every war ever conducted in human history was the explicit act of organized government action, ostensibly as an expression of the will of the people.
Anyway this isn't the right thread or forum for this kind of discussion. I hope you are right; my viewpoint is definitely not about to take over the world :)
Anyone wanting to be taken seriously on "disinformation" would get as far away as possible from a place like Harvard in the first place.
In short, few people actually care what Harvard has to say because it's popularly perceived as a mouthpiece for The Establishment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/23/online-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/30/biden-f...
The U.S. government has stopped warning some social networks about foreign disinformation campaigns ...
...
University academics and disinformation research groups are also in limbo. Many are seeking affordable legal representation to defend themselves against mounting cases and reevaluating their communication with industry and the public.
“The trust and safety workers are gone. The relationships with external researchers is now gone,” said Anika Collier Navaroli, senior fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a former senior Twitter policy official. “And now this third piece of the actual information from the government is gone. … So we’re basically unprotected.”
----------
Think how crazy that is - who is in favor of disinformation? How can universities - even Harvard - set precedents of not protecting open inquiry or their faculty, which will not stop here, and even indirectly support disinformation, the main threat to their mission of creating and disseminating knowledge. And as usual, there is no leadership; the Biden administration's answer to all problems is to avoid confrontation at all costs.
(I don't need a fix here, just pointing out some apparent bug.)
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/06/business/harvard-antisemitism...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/02/business/law-firms-antisemiti...
And yet, Harvard receives something like $500 million per year in donations. Why?
[edit] and of course the real rabbit hole is private prep schools. Good luck becoming president in this century without attending one. Wonder what their donor lists look like.
Bill Clinton made it last century, and Hillary almost made it this century. I don't think the odds are that stacked against public school attendees even now.
I do wonder if "prep" schools are recruiting more of the socially outstanding non-rich students than in previous years. Even so this can only have so much of an effect, as non-prep schools will always have valedictorians and social organizers regardless of who's pulled out beforehand.
This is both why people keep donating to Harvard, and how Harvard keeps marketing a 'need' for more donations. Along with, of course, either naming rights, or as an incentive to accept their child into the school (previous research has shown the ability and/or willingness of families to donate does add to the likelihood of admission).
Obviously institutions are at risk of capture by special interests. We can call them non profit but doesn't stop the economics and human nature. Same is true for politicians so oversight could make things even worse as it would be even more centralized and easier to capture .
So we should look for smaller individuals and groups to conduct research. Being public also creates a financial incentive. If your research indicates something is a fraud or very harmful you can short the stock to fund your research
If it's important research it's good if it's done by a renowned university that brings oversight and credibility for the research. Much better than the same researcher doing it in their basement, unless they are already famous and have their own following. Of course incidents like this and cases where research gets influenced into any direction hurt that benefit of research being done at a university.
I think this questions is backwards. This seems very much in line with other research already done at universities.
> So we should look for smaller individuals and groups to conduct research.
Smaller individual and groups can be much more easily sued. It's much easier to spin a story about suing some rogue partisan non-profit than it is for suing academic researchers.
> Being public also creates a financial incentive. If your research indicates something is a fraud or very harmful you can short the stock to fund your research
These sorts of financial incentives provide the easiest and simplest way of discrediting these groups (aside from simply ignoring them). All Meta has to say is "Don't believe a thing they say, they're simply doing it since they're shorting us".
Short selling has a long history. Obv people don't like them but don't know any successful lawsuits. Prob a lot easier and cheaper to capture a uni than sue some short seller.
Let me try again. One of the reasons research is supposed to be done at universities is specifically to remove financial incentives. Tenure is meant to insulate academia from having to worry about financial incentives and what is popular so they can focus on what is true.
> Prob a lot easier and cheaper to capture a uni than sue some short seller.
Meta doesn't have to sue a short seller. All Meta has to do is point to the now extremely clear conflict of interest. Having such a strong conflict of interest makes it easy to cause doubt about the validity of the research. And that's good enough. Compare two following two headlines:
1. Prestigious research group at Harvard shows wrongdoing on Meta's part.
2. Opportunistic short sellers put out yet another hit piece against Meta for their own financial gain.
It's like going to get your nutritional advice from the small sample size and suspect studies put out by supplement companies. Obviously they won't publish findings that go against their financial interests, or even run the experiments in the first place.
Wasn't this whole thing preempted by financial incentives playing a role in Harvard dropping the case. My point is financial incentives exist either way. The difference is that FB can point and say "Harvard says we're great and they have no financial incentives to lie *wink*" or we can say "sure I have a lot to gain if I'm right but that doesn't mean I'm wrong".
So you kind of made my point for me. It's the high minded veneer of objectivity I am most against
There exists no such expectations on other private companies.
This is a failure of the model, not business as usual.
Why not? Universities perform research - typically free from outside interference (academic freedom). And there are good reasons for academic freedom (which I'm not getting into here). As a consequence, academic freedom limits the reasons to stop this research from happening at a university.
So what is it in the contents of this research that makes you think it is not at an academic level or a violation of ethical standards?
Where else should it be done?
Supposedly academia is supposed to be the place that is free from economic incentives. Think about how we use the word "academically." As well as being a third party that is independent of the government. Even non-profits have to worry about economic value, just not about shareholders.[0]
I say supposedly because lots of academia is already captured by industry (or other entities). Computer science is a good example considering how common it is to work with industry partners. Sciences are mixed and there's good reason to work with industry that is highly rational and can provide huge benefits. But it does come with risk of capture. It should also be worrying if academic research becomes essentially an extension of a company's research arm because it does reduce innovation and exploration of ideas as research is pushed towards profit motivations but that's a very different kind of risk than the one discussed.
[0] In the last few decades we've adopted a mindset that everything should be a business model. This is true for academia. Maybe everything shouldn't be a business model. That doesn't mean things have to run at a loss but schools definitely are profit seeking in their current forms. The priority is not placed on education and research and thus presents an existential risk to these institutions. One could claim the death has already come but I'm not convinced.
In this specific case: Because it started there and institutions that claim to be neutral or to use scientific methods should not stop research because they are paid to do so.
In the general case: When speaking bad about big actors, reputation and a big budget for lawyers can make a lot of lawsuits go away before they even start.
Maybe. And maybe not. I think you need both. The larger, public institution is the lightning rod. They get all the attention, but also all the scrutiny. Smaller groups are difficult to track. The more you have of them, the more difficult it is to account for their methods and funding and so on. So you pit the smaller groups against the large public institution. The smaller groups are the chihuahuas barking at the bulldog.
Instead of eliminating the big institution, you subject it to higher standards and scrutiny. More severe punishments for bad behavior, and perhaps also better rewards for good behavior.
I guess the question is ... why shouldn't it be? Social media is a huge part of modern life in the US, has a massive impact and is all both pretty recent and poorly understood. I would expect any half decent university with anthropology or sociology (or even a political science) departments to be doing heavy research in this field.
You have a major knowledge gap here. Other than for literal lab start up funds for brand-new professors universities typically don't grant much money, if any at all, to their professors for research. The professors are expected to seek outside funds, of which a good chunk then goes to the university for the university's costs.
This may not be the same at Harvard, I genuinely don't know. But it's typical at most research universities.
It's outrageous that Harvard won't fund such an insightful, groundbreaking researcher.
Hopefully, another university will step up and help us discover if there is any possible link between Zuck and Meta.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_DonovanTFA flatly tells that she brought in her own funding from outside grants. Like the vasy majority of academic researchers do. She claims that Harvard is keeping this money even though it was dedicated to her research agenda.
> Though Donovan’s contract was supposed to keep her on the job through the end of 2024, her superiors took away her ability to start new projects, raise money or organize large events, she alleges. They kept the money she had brought in, including more than $1 million from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark that he wanted specifically to go to her research project, according to documents quoted in the declaration. Newmark declined to comment.
It's right there in the article.
People have wrong ideas as to what kinds of funds and resources academic researchers actually have access to from their employing institution.
Big Social.
The reason it made sense to me is that when the article said “Big Tech” it didn’t feel right.
I'm sure she was a valuable source for reporters needing dramatic quotes on a slow news day, but really there should be more heft than that.
A tenure-track professorship is faculty. So probably an assistant professorship.
It's hard to actually believe anything about this without having specific examples of what was done.
The title is pretty farcical given this.