A misinformation expert encouraged picket lines at Tesla sites to protest DOGE cuts. Then came the online threats

(CNN) — Sociologist Joan Donovan rarely looks at social media posts about herself on X anymore. She already knows what’s being said.

“Joan Donovan is reportedly the lead agitator and organizer behind nationwide Tesla terrorism,” reads a post from Sunday afternoon. “Why hasn’t she been arrested?”

Shortly after midnight Tuesday, Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk – who’s recently become the Trump administration’s slasher-in-chief of the federal workforce – reposted that message with a raised-eyebrow emoji.

“I’d be an idiot,” Donovan said, “if I didn’t worry.”

Since Musk’s repost, more X users have amplified criticism of Donovan and others for encouraging or taking part in nonviolent protests at Tesla facilities to denounce Musk’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency downsizing of the federal government, claiming they are inciting criminals.

“The FBI needs to confiscate all their documents, phones, and computers immediately,” reads a post that tagged that bureau and the Department of Homeland Security. Another says Donovan – an academic who specializes in online misinformation – was “organizing and inciting violence against Tesla and Elon Musk.”

“You kind of wake up every day and look at your email and you can see, ‘Oh, last night at 10 p.m., someone must have said something about me because I’ve got 50 emails,’” Donovan told CNN.

A wave of violent attacks has unfolded in recent months on Tesla vehicles, dealerships, service centers and chargers across the United States, with an FBI task force now investigating the sort of incidents Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have labeled domestic terrorism.

But the protest movement Donovan helped create in February was always meant to be an alternative to violence, not to encourage it, she told CNN.

“I was appalled to see the property damage that was on the rise and vandalism around Tesla, so one of my major goals was to figure out what is a public tactic that other people can feel safe participating in,” she said Tuesday.

Now, the ferocity of the response targeting Donovan, an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, has yielded death threats and forced her to take security precautions, she said.

Some of Donovan’s academic colleagues have been threatened, too, and Boston University no longer displays her work email address online, she added.

“It’s been interesting from a perspective of somebody who studies things like doxing and swatting,” Donovan said. “It’s not unfamiliar territory.”

Protests can have ‘a festive atmosphere’

Even before Trump won the November election – with Musk’s substantial financial backing and public support – Teslas reportedly were being targeted. The electric vehicle maker’s CEO seemed to brush off the incidents, posting about a month before inauguration on X, “Anyone who vandalizes a Tesla will have a criminal record. Go ahead, make my day.”

Since Musk took an active role in government, there has been a significant uptick in vandalism and arson against Tesla vehicles – a trend Donovan has disapproved of from the start, she told CNN, because of its bent toward violence.

So, she took the notion of protesting Musk – the world’s richest person – by targeting Tesla and tried to pivot toward more peaceful options with an online #TeslaTakedown campaign, encouraging people to “picket on the sidewalk” at any Tesla dealership.

The movement picked up steam when Alex Winter – an actor best known for the “Bill & Ted” film franchise who is also a politically active documentary filmmaker – reached out to Donovan, combining the protest effort with his own campaign to encourage people to sell their Tesla stock and vehicles.

Since then, protests at Tesla facilities, often drawing hundreds, have emerged in dozens of US cities. And there’s nothing menacing about them, Donovan said.

“People bring their children. They bring dogs,” she said. “It’s actually quite a festive atmosphere.”

That climate, however, was pierced Saturday outside a Tesla dealership near West Palm Beach, Florida, when protesters had to rush for cover as an SUV plowed onto the curb, authorities said.

A Tesla employee told police the driver got out of the vehicle, went inside the dealership and said he stands with Tesla, according to an arrest report.

Administration suggests attacks are coordinated, contradicting FBI

While other activists and a member of Congress have prominently joined the peaceful Tesla protest effort, Donovan thinks she knows why her name keeps showing up in MAGA social media. The reason aligns with another focus of the Trump administration: cracking down on universities, students and faculty members with funding cuts and immigration actions.

“I think part of it is a stereotype of being one of these university professors that they wish didn’t exist,” said Donovan.

Trump, Musk and Bondi have all said, without providing evidence, they believe a group is coordinating and funding recent politically motivated attacks on Tesla, even as an FBI announcement last week asserted the incidents “appear to have been conducted by lone offenders” who “may perceive these attacks as victimless property crimes.”

Donovan has been an activist for a long time, attending protests of all kinds since her teenage years, she said, and she doesn’t recognize the picture her online critics are painting.

“Some of the claims are really weird to me, like that I’m a top Democratic donor. I’m like, I’ve never made a political donation,” she said. An online Federal Election Commission database lists no donations from Donovan.

“#TeslaTakedown movement is committed to waging nonviolence,” she reiterated Sunday on the social network Bluesky.

Musk is not the first tech titan Donovan has criticized publicly.

She accused Meta – the company that owns Facebook – of getting her removed in 2023 from her position running the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, saying the school shut the project down after receiving a $500 million donation from a group run by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Both Harvard and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative strongly denied any donor interference.

Protesters say Musk responsible for ‘his own brand’s reputation’

Musk frequently has bristled online at people expressing anger at Tesla for his government cuts. In another X post in response to a woman who posted a video on X saying she is “judging” Tesla drivers, Musk responded: “She’s mentally ill.”

Pressuring Musk, Tesla’s largest shareholder, to step down from the company is unrealistic, business analysts say. “Tesla is Musk, and Musk is Tesla,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to clients. “They are synonymous and cannot be separated.”

And it’s hard to know how much the protests are affecting Tesla’s bottom line. The company has clearly struggled since Trump took office and Musk took over DOGE, with the rate of Tesla trade-ins tripling over the past year, according to Edmunds, and its stock price down about 40% from its high mark.

Musk encouraged Tesla employees in an online town hall this month to “hang on to your stock” and posted on X about the share price’s partial rebound this week.

As protests against Tesla continue, Donovan argues anyone blaming her and other organizers of nonviolent picket lines for the company’s recent difficulties is looking in the wrong direction.

They believe “it’s somehow an effect of some strange conspiracy and cabal,” she said, “but really Musk is the one who’s done the most damage to his own brand’s reputation.”

CNN’s Auzinea Bacon, Allison Morrow, Donie O’Sullivan and Clare Duffy contributed to this report.

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