Harvard University has quietly ended its “misinformation” research program, giving the boot to director Dr. Joan Donovan, who cast doubt on the Hunter Biden “Laptop from Hell” story.
The program was founded in 2019, part of the post-2016 boom in “misinformation” research departments on campuses around the western world.
Hunter Biden photo from laptop. (Breitbart News)
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
These departments, alongside various think tanks, nonprofits, and “fact checkers,” benefited from an influx of attention and funding from globalist billionaires, emerged out of nowhere following the election of Donald Trump to assume a leading role in the censorship of social media platforms.
Dr. Donovan, who led the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard, was one of the beneficiaries of this trend. But her program has now been shuttered by the university, a decision which it said was done for “bureaucratic” reasons.
In an email obtained by Semafor, the director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy said that the project represented a “limited exception” to the Harvard Kennedy School’s policy that “all research projects must be led by a full faculty member.”
Exceptions to the policy, said the email, “can’t continue indefinitely without a faculty member as the principal project leader and academic head.”
While heading the project, Donovan cast doubt on the Hunter Biden laptop story, which leftist media reluctantly admitted was a valid story, years after it was broken by Emma-Jo Morris and Miranda Devine in the New York Post in 2020. Donovan’s argument? That Hunter Biden could have afforded a better laptop repair man.
“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 has evidence of crimes on? I mean, it’s really hard to believe,” said Donovan on a Harvard Kennedy School podcast.
