Joan Donovan’s introduction to the internet began in the late ’90s when she got her first computer for her 18th birthday. Growing up in the age of AOL, she would connect with people over the music scene in Boston and read political blogs.
“I’ve always seen the internet as having this culturally important way of organizing your own life and your own identity, but also then being able to reach out and find different kinds of people,” she said.
At 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, Donovan will discuss how online culture and media manipulation can assist with the rise of authoritarian and extremist movements. Donovan spoke remotely for CHQ Assembly in 2020, and this is her first time in-person at Chautauqua. Serving as the midpoint of Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Six theme “The Global Rise of Authoritarianism,” she acknowledged how some might be skeptical of how her work relates to such a grandiose topic.
“Sometimes people perceive it almost like a joke. What does the internet have to do with politics anyway?” she said. “… But through my work, I’ve been able to understand more about media manipulation and disinformation by looking at the infrastructure by which conspiracies and lies and ‘fake news’ travel online.”
Donovan is an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University and co-authored the book Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. Her academic research has brought her to some of the darker corners of the internet as she studied how white supremacists use DNA ancestry tests and technology while she was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics.
However, her research into political activity on the internet did not begin with conspiracies about 23andMe. When Donovan first moved to Los Angeles, she connected with other LA activists as part of the Occupy movement, becoming an organizer herself.
“What I came to realize is it really was a meme that had come to life,” she said. “There was no central organizing group. There were basically people hearing about what someone was doing in one area and then replicating it in another city.”
As an academic, this drove her into reading literature from the Civil Rights era and how that movement organized sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Instead of the internet, churches served as the hub for sharing information and assembling these protests.
“It was really interesting to compare that tactical innovation across these movements, and I became very focused on looking at what happens to a movement like Occupy when there isn’t a central organizing infrastructure,” she said.
That concern led her to incorporate conference calling technology into the movement.
“One of the things that you learn as you become more and more embedded in social movements is that communication is key, but it’s not a kind of communication where you just send an email or you post a tweet,” she said. “You actually have to interact with people, and voice-to-voice communication can really help rapidly build trust.”
When LA activists began to hear that mayors would be breaking up the encampments around Christmastime in 2011, they turned to the conference calling system to keep the movement alive. From advocating for justice for Trayvon Martin to Occupy Sandy — a grassroots movement aimed at assisting those affected by the 2012 hurricane — the Occupy movement transformed beyond its original goal.
Donovan’s work with the Occupy movement led her to coordinate aid relief across the nation.
“I was sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles, and I was on the phone with ‘Sesame Street,’ and they wanted to volunteer and give their entire staff a day to volunteer as part of the recovery efforts,” Donovan said. “Organizing that and being in LA, but also being tied into activists in New York City, made it pretty exciting to be effective in this distributed network.”
Not only were the friends on “Sesame Street” noticing Occupy Sandy, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security noted its powerful ability to equip people to help using social media.
Seeing firsthand how the internet could aid in social movements equipped Donovan in her research about how other groups used platforms to engage with people.
“Around 2015, I started to notice that it wasn’t just pro-social movements using the internet for organizing, but you had these anti-social movements like the rise of the alt-right was happening,” she said.
When now-President Donald Trump first came down the golden escalator to announce his run for president, Donovan saw how white supremacists reacted online to his statement of “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best.”
Initially, white supremacists thought his campaign was doomed because he had said the quiet part out loud.
“Then over the next two weeks, they really started to buy in, because Trump doubled down,” Donovan said. “He didn’t apologize. He kept saying the thing, and you started to see within the messages, the mood or the vibe that shifted.”
Trump’s online presence also helped bolster his popularity.
“He was being very — I hate to say it — he was very charismatic. He was very funny, and it was hard to ignore,” Donovan said. “But the other thing he had built into his campaigns were these memes, like ‘Lock Her Up’ in particular, that people would chant at rallies, they would merchandise, they would use online to identify each other.”
Besides social media providing a place for political figures to gain a base, social media sites and the tech companies that control them hold immense political power. Before Donovan became a professor at Boston University, she was the research director for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy where she and her team researched misinformation, disinformation and media manipulation. While there, she became a whistleblower over her dismissal from her research position as Harvard was about to receive a $500 million pledge from Meta’s philanthropic organization, filing a 248-page legal statement.
While Donovan gives credit to tech companies for working to disarm medical misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, other areas of misinformation become murky.
“Part of freedom of expression is also the right to the truth,” Donovan said. “If we don’t believe that we have a human right to the truth, then you end up with tech CEOs like Zuckerberg saying, ‘Well, I don’t think Holocaust denialism is misinformation. Some people have those views, and we don’t need to moderate it,’ ” which he said to Kara Swisher in 2018.
Tech CEOS hold an incredible amount of power, and Donovan points to when Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey de-platformed Trump in 2021. She used to joke that they were “the highest-paid content moderators in the world.”
“Whether it’s your personal opinion or not, that Trump should have been removed, he still was the sitting U.S. president, and the fact that these technology companies were willing to flex in that way was really alarming for me as a researcher because it made it made me realize that the the real great power competition happening right now is between the technology companies and what their vision of the world should be versus democratic societies and how important it is to have information systems that care about quality as much as they care about quantity,” she said.
Donovan’s research largely focuses on the negative aspects of the internet, but she still finds ways to find joy in it. In November 2020, she helped create the beaver emoji, citing its importance both for Canadians and for the lesbian community.
“I like humor. I like things that are funny, and I think that’s sometimes why I’m drawn to studying memes,” Donovan said. “I mean, I really overemphasize the bad effects of memes in my research, but the friendlier side of me also thinks jokes can be a very important tool for building culture, especially in a moment like this, resisting authoritarianism, which is why I’m incredibly honored to be part of the conversation at Chautauqua.”
