Tech giant Meta, owner of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, is using philanthropy to influence universities in the US. 

That’s according to a report published by the Tech Transparency Project, which has found that both Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to over 100 US universities and colleges.  

Recipients of these donations range from research powerhouses like the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to smaller institutions like Des Moines Area Community College. In some cases, the gifts can support entire academic programmes or comprise of a large portion of an academic institution’s overall funding. 

The findings also suggest that two Meta employees hold advisory positions at the University of Washington’s Reality Lab, which was launched in 2018 with industry support including a $2 million contribution from Meta. 

Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organisation founded by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, have yet to publicly comment on the report.  

Zuckerberg’s philanthropic gifts and their potential influence on universities have come under the spotlight since whistleblower and online disinformation expert Joan Donovan accused Harvard University of pushing her out of a job, after receiving a $500 million donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. 

Donovan, who filed a whistleblower complaint to the US Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general, has accused the university of creating a campaign of pressure and restrictions while she worked on a project that was embarrassing for Meta that included an archive of internal Meta documents leaked by famous former Facebook employee Frances Haugen.  

Harvard says it was unable to find a sponsor to oversee Donovan’s work and has denied that she was fired. 

Meta’s donations mostly saw it donate its own virtual reality headsets. Grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative include between $800 million and $1 billion donated to a biomedical research consortium of The University of California (UC), Berkeley, Stanford University, and UC San Francisco. 

$500 million was also given to launch the Kempner Institute for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard. 

Critics say Zuckerberg’s and Meta’s tech equipment donations ensure universities continually rely, and come back, for more products. 

“Ultimately, it puts them in a situation where they have to continue acquiring that technology to keep their efforts going. And it’s really a way for the tech companies to indoctrinate their technology that they profit from into these ecosystems,” said Tech Transparency Project director Katie Paul, speaking to the Marketplace Tech podcast. “We’ve seen similar efforts more broadly with, for instance, Google Chromebooks in classrooms across the United States,” she added.  

Despite ethics and codes in place to prevent corporate influence in the academic space, Paul says those are not laws and therefore difficult to enforce. 

“When it comes to ethics codes, it’s really up to the public and up to whistleblowers like Joan Donovan to hold universities accountable for failing to comply with the ethics codes when it comes to this kind of corporate funding,” said Paul.  

Shafi Musaddique is news editor at Alliance magazine.