The Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review has retracted an article which claimed – or misclaimed, as the case may be – that an African American advocacy movement discouraged Blacks from voting for Democratic politicians and suppressed news about the Covid-19 pandemic.
The article, “Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news,” appeared in the Special Issue on Disinformation in the 2020 Elections published in January by the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.
ADOS is short for American Descendants of Slavery, an online movement that calls for reparations for slavery in the United States. The movement – which uses the hashtag #ADOS on social media – was founded by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore.
The article was written by Mutale Nkonde, the founding CEO of AI For the People, and co-authors including several affiliated with MoveOn, a progressive political organization.
According to the abstract of the paper, which is no longer available online:
In this essay, we conduct a descriptive content analysis from a sample of a dataset made up of 534 thousand scraped tweets, supplemented with access to 1.36 million tweets from the Twitter firehose, from accounts that used the #ADOS hashtag between November 2019 and September 2020. ADOS is an acronym for American Descendants of Slavery, a largely online group that operates within Black online communities. We find that the ADOS network strategically uses breaking news events to discourage Black voters from voting for the Democratic party, a phenomenon we call disinformation creep. Conversely, the ADOS network has remained largely silent about the impact of the novel coronavirus on Black communities, undermining its claims that it works in the interests of Black Americans.
But those conclusions didn’t sit well with ADOS, which in June published a rebuttal which claimed that the authors of the article used a “corrupt and biased approach” in what was:
a clear attempt to use the Ivy League institution’s esteemed name to legitimize an ongoing smear campaign directed at the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement. The report ascribes a familiar set of demonstrably false motivations to our political advocacy, with the authors frequently substituting subjective claims, innuendo, and outright lies for the sort of empirically-backed assertions one would expect to find in a publication from such a prestigious university. …
We reject in the strongest terms possible the allegation that the ADOS organization has ever used breaking news to manipulate the Black community into voting Republican or, for that matter, abstaining entirely from the act of voting in the 2020 presidential election. And one will search the Harvard report in vain trying to locate a single piece of evidence that substantiates that claim.
The journal in turn arranged for an outside review of the data in the article by Alexei Abrahams, then a data scientist at the Kennedy School (he’s now at Princeton).
Abrahams concluded that the argument advanced by Nkonde and her colleagues lacked rigor, offered “unsubstantiated” assertions and that he found ADOS’ “criticisms to be justified”:
Overall, it is evident that the way that Nkonde et al 2021 collected data limited their visibility into social media activity by the ADOS founders, which in turn biased their view of them. Even among the tweets that they did collect, however, those that were potentially exonerative were not surfaced in the journal article.
And, he stated:
The notion that these tweets are deviously engineered to manipulate their audiences is a very supply-side view of social media activity, yet the authors offer no scientific strategy for ruling out the more innocuous demand-side story.
The retraction notice lays out the controversy:
After concerns were brought to our attention by the organization that is the object of the study, challenging the validity of the findings reported by Nkonde et al., the journal commissioned an internal review, conducted by a Harvard researcher not directly affiliated with the journal. The internal review found flaws in the methodology, as well as discrepancies between the data and the findings reported by the authors, resulting in unsubstantiated conclusions drawn from their analyses. We then commissioned an external independent review to verify the findings of the initial investigation.
After the post-publication review process was completed, the authors were invited to respond to the issues identified by the two reviewers. In their response, the authors conceded several of the defects in the study identified by the internal and external reviewers. The retraction decision was not taken lightly but is one that we feel was necessary, as certain of the principal conclusions reported in this paper cannot be considered reliable or valid.
The journal added that it, too, bore responsibility for the controversy:
It is important to acknowledge that this outcome also represents a failure of the journal’s editorial process. We, thus, intend to scrutinize our own practices, procedures, and policies to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
Neither Carnell nor Nkonde have responded to requests for comment. We’ll update this post with anything we learn. [See updates.]
Update, 1830 UTC, 12/22/21: Carnell tells us that she is “not at all satisfied:”
For months, members of the ADOS Advocacy Foundation, and its supporters, made phone calls, tweeted, wrote rebuttals, & reached out to dozens of journalists to get this retraction. That’s time spent that could’ve & should’ve been spent furthering our mission to advocate for reparations & a transformative Black agenda.
In response to our legitimate efforts to clear our name, the writers of Disinformation Creep blocked us on social media & ignored our calls & emails. Not only did this journal article damage the personal reputations of myself & Antonio Moore, but it damaged the reputation of a movement that was, up until this article was published, getting mainstream press & attention.
This article threw cold water on our momentum, an act which I can’t help but wonder if this was intentional. (Why would a wealthy white institution choose to put a small, Black group in its crosshairs? Why was MoveOn involved? Given their blatant conflict of interest?)
Now, almost a year after this article was first published, Harvard has finally reached the inevitable conclusion that Disinformation Creep was littered with unsubstantiated allegations.
It’s too little, too late. It never should’ve been published.
Update, 2230 UTC, 12/22/21: Nkonde tells us:
I do not think the retraction is valid, we wrote to the journal in September where we addressed their concerns here.
We do not think it was warranted because it addressed our analysis of the ADOS’s use of popular culture and their evasion of COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic. This could have been corrected. The central argument was their role in Black voter dissuasion, please see a video of Yvette Carnell asking Black people not to vote during the 2020 election unless they are promised reparations, here.
The authors are very disappointed. The review said we could resubmit the article and we are consider other options for resubmission.
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“I do not think the retraction is valid, we wrote to the journal in September where we addressed their concerns here.’ Even after addressing the concerns of the editors, the reviewers, both internal and external, still decided that the rebuttal that ADOSAF submitted was valid and they seemed to provide better evidence for their counterclaims than evidence used by the authors of Disinformation creep to validate their claims .
The authors’ methodologies to collect data were clearly faulty, and did not support the conclusions set forth in the article. The work lacks rigor and basic research approaches.
Finally, many of the authors were connected to MoveOn, a group that are loyal to the democratic party as they have raised millions of dollars on behalf of the party. One might easily assume that Move On or those authors affiliated with Move On, were against down ballot voting and wanted to kill the ADOS movement possibly because it was gaining momentum and they were desperate for a Biden/Kamala win, so they sent their workers to do the job.
Harvard made the right decision to retract this non-serious report laced with inaccuracies and blatant lies. There is no room for this level of amateurism in academia.
Harvard is not doing enough to hold everyone involved in the retracted disinformation creep journal accountable. There shouldn’t be no amends to a fabricated document.
Also Harvard needs to explain why Nkonde with no degrees in data sciences or technology, was the expert in all of this?
Slandering Black Americans fighting for justice using Harvard platforms shouldn’t be a career booster for the aurhors nor anyone! They should be made to answer questions and face the consequences falsifying data, by which they ALL became the “disinformation misinformation” spreaders.
Harvard’s Misinformation Review made a terrible decision. What’s not being discussed here is the fact that the Review bowed down to pressure from the ADOS co-founders that launched a harassment campaign against the authors and editors called “#CrimsonSmear.” It was only after the intimidation campaign was launched that they started a “post review” of the article to please ADOS leaders. The Misinformation Review had no problem with the article until the campaign against it was launched by Yvette Carnell. The Editorial board mistreated the authors, acted unethically, and should be investigated.
“Harvard’s Misinformation Review made a terrible decision.” I agree. They made a terrible decision when they decided to publish Disinformation creep in the first place. This is the publication’s ethics statement: “The HKS Misinformation Review insists on ethical behavior from its editors, reviewers, and authors. Our policies are closely aligned with COPE’s (Committee on Publication Ethics) Core Practices document, which can be accessed at: https://publicationethics.org/files/editable-bean/COPE_Core_Practices_0.pdf. Any cases of ethical misconduct will be treated very seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with COPE guidelines.” The authors’ ethics were questioned, so the editors, bound to their standard, acted accordingly. The authors, who mostly do not represent the subjects of their unserious “research”, wanted to put an end to the message that resonates with many “African-Americans” in order to perpetuate the flattening of blackness, and voting democrat despite not receiving policies that would benefit ADOS communities, and being taken for granted because they are a captured voting bloc.
Wrong.
The retraction was the correct decision. The notion that a powerful institution like The Harvard Kennedy school could be intimidated by a small black advocacy group is laughable.
The work the sloppy and disingenuous and The Editorial Board made the right call. The retraction explained in detail why the original paper was flawed and the only thing that should be investigated is why the paper was published in the first place.
Since that fiasco with ADOS, #ADOS, AmercianDOS, American Descendants of Slavery and the retraction made by Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review on the inaccurate and poorly researched information as published in January 2021 by the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, MoveOn is dead to me.
There were at least five individuals from the MoveOn organization that just jumped on the bandwagon and rode down the road of misinforming the public and causing pain and suffering to both individuals, Ms. Yvette Carnell, Attorney Antonio Moore, and the organization itself.
Your organization is in bed with Big Brother. You wanted us quiet because the ticket of Biden/Harris was so important to you. You attacked my brother and sister with no solid evidence to the contrary. You just went along with the get along gang and blindly followed Mutale Nkonde, the founding CEO of AI For the People. SHE WAS WRONG. Her work was that of a new high school student in first year journalism. I mean seriously. She was a freaking college professor who thought she would slam these “Negroes” and nothing would happen because they don’t matter.
In your face. She has lost all credibility with Harvard after this fiasco! How can she be trusted to submit work after she has proven to be incapable of providing adequate research and investigation in her articles?
Someone in your organization should have fact checked Nkonde. All of you just went hog wild attacking ADOS unjustly. Mutale Nkonde needs to publicly apologize to ADOS, Ms. Carnell and Attorney Moore for the malicious, erroneous, paper allowed to be put out by Harvard.
The retraction should have been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and every Black print in America! This was huge to have Harvard retract an article! That means the persons writing the article were uninformed. I’m just saying.
You lose.
Have a blessed life.
As one of many who support the ADOS Advocacy Foundation, I waited many months for one of the countries oldest universities (as well as one with a terrible history of harming the slaves that built their institution and their descendants) to practice some of the academic rigor they are supposedly known for and retract the dishonest hit piece published by Mutale Nkonde et al. The harm done to ADOS is immeasurable. The effort required by a small but determined grassroots organization to face a academic behemoth like Harvard University and their billion dollar endowment is hard to imagine. However, armed with determination, facts and real data We saw an improbable outcome in this travesty of journalistic malpractice.
Shame on Harvard and its team of international academic mercenaries and political operatives hit squads like MOVEON who target organic advocacy groups that seek an outcome that doesn’t keep American descendants of chattel slaves on the perpetual bottom in the country we helped make the global powerhouse it is today.
Congratulations to the ADOS Advocacy foundation, Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore
Harvard did the right thing by having this elementary level article retracted. It’s a shame that it was ever published in the first place. It is filled with blatant lies and misinformation targeting a small, Black, grassroots advocacy group who is fighting for reparations. All involved should be held accountable for their lack of academic integrity. Shame on the authors for caring more about their own gain than the millions of Black Americans lives they affected with their slanderous, shoddy work.
Oddly enough, neither the original article nor the rebuttal offered by Nkonde appears to be academically sound. I have no idea how the article survived the initial peer-review process. Perhaps the reputation of the journal can be somewhat redeemed by the retraction. Even the original article reads as if politically connected individuals had an ax to grind with these individuals, grabbed a few tweets, wrapped qualitative research around it and the term misinformation and it was enough to get published. Credible researchers spend countless hours doing real research and struggle to get it acknowledged and published. It is disheartening to know that a more worthy article might have been shelved for what appears to have amounted to a political hit job on an organization most people have never considered.
At best, this article was poorly researched, poorly written, and poorly reviewed. At worst, the author(s) appear to have done what they accused the organization’s members of doing. It seems the authors were passing along misinformation in the hopes of influencing or manipulating the general public. However, the authors apparently had the assistance of a powerful and resource-rich progressive organization and a prestigious predominately white institution of higher learning. Not to mention, now the author (benefactor of deep pockets and connections, one assumes) is suggesting that it is she who has been harmed and is a victim, rather than the random grassroots activists that she plucked out of Twitter to thrust into the limelight as unwilling research subjects (topics). Never mind that this survived a peer review process, how did it even survive an institutional review board process to get started?
Hopefully, the next article that slips through the journal’s peer-review process won’t be qualitative research on the dangers of electric vehicles and co-authored by Exxon.
The cofounders of the #ADOS movement are suing Harvard for defamation. Read all about it in the link provided below.
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/moore-harvard-complaint.pdf