Joan Donovan, one of the world’s leading experts in misinformation, was dying to set the record straight. On a brisk November night, she told me a story about why she’d left Harvard University. It was captured, she claimed, by a corporation she had loudly criticized, one with far too much power over our democracy: Meta.
Donovan had been preparing for months to air this accusation in public, and I’d flown to Boston to interview her before the big day. At the moment, she had just heard through her lawyer that Harvard wanted to talk. “What are they going to offer me, $5 million?” she mused as we sat in a cafe. She wore a leather jacket over head-to-toe black, and a whistle dangled from her neck. “How am I going to feel about that money if I don’t tell the truth?”