Rebekah Jones (born July 25, 1989) is an American geographer, data scientist, and activist. She is known for her COVID-19 activism in Florida, allegations against the Florida Department of Health and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, an unsubstantiated whistleblower complaint after being fired, and several legal issues. She was referred to as a whistleblower and awarded with several honors, but many public officials and media outlets labeled her a conspiracy theorist after investigation into her and her allegations.
In May 2022, Florida's Office of Inspector General (OIG) dismissed a 2020 whistleblower complaint filed by Jones after she was fired by the state for insubordination. In May 2020, Jones was terminated from her position managing the team that created Florida's ArcGIS COVID-19 dashboard after being repeatedly reprimanded for sharing the department's work online without authorization. Jones alleged instead that she was told to manipulate the dashboard's data and that her firing was retaliation for her refusal. The OIG exonerated state health officials, finding her allegations to be unsubstantiated and unfounded. Jones later posted on social media a forgery of the dismissal letter from the Florida Commission on Human Relations, such that it appeared that her complaint had been validated.
In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020. The execution of the warrant with armed police, widely referred to as a raid, was due to a 2016 battery charge against Jones by the Louisiana State University police. In 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2019 charge of cyberstalking a former Florida State University student. She was fired from both institutions.
Jones has a popular Twitter (X) account where she is a controversial figure and activist. Her viral tweets have resulted in multiple highly successful GoFundMe campaigns, earning more than $500,000, which has been criticized. Jones has used her Twitter account to make unsupported statements on a variety of topics, including COVID-19 and DeSantis, one of which NBC News called a conspiracy theory. She also instigated fights with academics, journalists, and public officials. She was suspended from Twitter in 2021 for platform manipulation and later reinstated. After a successful social media campaign for Democratic candidacy in Florida's 1st congressional district, she was defeated by Matt Gaetz in the 2022 U.S. House of Representatives elections in Florida.
Early life and education
Jones was born in Windber, Pennsylvania, to blue-collar parents. At the age of nine, her family moved to Wiggins, Mississippi, where she spent most of her childhood. She grew up poor, often housing and food insecure. Jones attended Stone High School, where she missed months of school during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She says her experiences in Katrina made her interested in natural disasters. In her junior year, Jones was removed from class for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and led other students to do the same after learning from civil liberties groups she was acting within her rights. She graduated from Chestnut Ridge Senior High School in 2007 after moving to Bedford, Pennsylvania to live with her grandparents.
Jones graduated cum laude from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University with dual degrees in geography and journalism in 2012. While at Syracuse, Jones was a features writer and the student business manager for The Daily Orange and worked as a special projects intern at the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems.
In 2014, she received a master's degree in geography and a minor in mass communication from Louisiana State University. In 2015, her research titled Quantifying Extreme Weather Event Impacts on the Northern Gulf Coast Using Landsat Imagery was published in the Journal of Coastal Research. While at LSU, she worked as a coastal resources scientist for the state of Louisiana and as a geospatial specialist for the Louisiana Sea Grant.
Jones was a graduate student in the Department of Geography at Florida State University from 2016 through 2018, where she worked on a doctoral dissertation until she was dismissed from the PhD program in 2019 due to misconduct in her teaching position.
Florida Department of Health
In September 2018, she became a geographic information system (GIS) analyst at Florida Department of Health (DOH) in Tallahassee and worked on the agency's emergency response team during Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Dorian. Jones performed analysis and modeling of mapping and surveillance data to provide information to the public and state officials used to coordinate disaster response, like the organization of patient movement to open beds between interstate hospitals. In November 2019, she was appointed to a manager role within GIS handling analysis and tracking of environmental health data and health services.
COVID-19 dashboard team In March 2020, Jones used Esri's ArcGIS software to create Florida Department of Health's COVID-19 dashboard. She managed the dashboard team for two months. The following month, Carina Blackmore, an epidemiologist and the director for the division, assembled a small team including Jones "to develop new data for a reopening plan." When the criteria supplied by the White House showed that highly populated counties were ready to open, but not rural counties, Blackmore suggested lower populations might be held to a different standard to account for natural social distancing. Jones opposed the use of federal guidelines to make low-population areas more resilient to small, containable spikes in cases and disagreed with the epidemiologists on her team about methodology by which the state evaluated readiness to reopen. She opposed the way the state computed test positivity rates and believes that positive results for antibody testing should be included in cumulative case totals, which outside epidemiologists don't recommend, as they can skew results.
Removal from COVID-19 team and firing In May 2020, Florida news outlets reported a data field was removed from the dashboard data for less than 24 hours after a Miami Herald reporter made an inquiry to DOH about evidence they said could indicate an earlier community spread. The inquiry was handled by Jones's team. Shamarial Roberson, Deputy Secretary of Health, said the field was a self-reported date indicating when patients believed their symptoms began or may have come into contact with the virus. Division director Blackmore said she then instructed Jones to disable exporting data files to ensure the data matched what was in their PDF counterpart, which they were unaware Jones had published. Jones objected, claiming it was unethical. In emails she said, "This is the wrong call," and "I'm not pulling our primary resource for coronavirus data because he (Pritchard) wants to stick it to journalists." Blackmore said the temporary removal was due to concerns about privacy and potential misunderstanding and misuse of the field. The following day, Jones was removed from the COVID-19 dashboard team. She threatened to quit and went on leave. She sent an email to a public listserv suggesting her removal from the dashboard team should cast doubt on the data's integrity, inferring it was punishment for her commitment to accessibility and transparency.
On May 18, Jones was fired for insubordination, after refusing an offer to resign. The Associated Press reported that state records detailed repeated warnings by her supervisor not to publicly discuss her work without permission, including releasing unauthorized charts. The spokesperson for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said Jones was dismissed for making unilateral decisions about the dashboard without consulting others on the team, to which her superiors testified. Jones alleged she was fired because she refused to manipulate data to indicate reopening readiness in rural counties to align with the governor' reopening plan.
Whistleblower complaint Jones filed a formal complaint in July 2020 for wrongful termination and misconduct of DOH officials. She was granted formal whistleblower protections by the Florida Office of Inspector General in May 2021 while investigation into her claims was ongoing.
Jones alleged that deputy health secretary Roberson ordered Jones to manually change the data to support reopening. While the subsequent May 4 reopening resulted in a surge in cases, DeSantis used an external task force, not the DOH, to make recommendations on reopening. The governor said, "It's not up to the health department to say a 'yes' or a 'no'." Jones alleged on Twitter that she was ordered to delete positive test results and deaths, and that the state was hiding such data to make the pandemic seem less deadly, which NBC News called a conspiracy theory. Discrepancies in death counts from Jones's understanding of the data came from nonresident deaths, which were forwarded to the deceased's home. DeSantis was criticized for reopening against the advice of epidemiologists.
In May 2022, the Florida Office of Inspector General published their findings that her claims were unsubstantiated and lacked sufficient evidence, and exonerated officials she accused of wrongdoing. The instruction to restrict access to raw data was not a violation of any governing directive. Marc Caputo of NBC News wrote that "the independent report paints a portrait of an employee who did not understand public health policy or the significance of epidemiological data, did not have high-level access to crucial information and leveled claims that made professional health officials 'skeptical.'" Several news outlets and public officials have since called her credibility and narrative into question, referring to her as a "fraud," "grifter," and "conspiracy theorist."
Subsequent activities On October 26, 2022, Jones posted an altered image of a letter from the Florida Commission on Human Relations on her Instagram account, which she said proved that her whistleblower claims were validated. The caption read "Someone let Marc Caputo know he's a lying sack of s--t." The differences included adding a statement that she had "demonstrated a) violation of law 'which create and presents a substantial and specific danger to the public's health, safety, or welfare;' or b) actual or suspected 'gross mismanagement' as defined by the Act, …" and references to specific rules related to firing state employees. There were also inconsistencies in the text's formatting and style. She subsequently deleted the post, but maintains that the version Caputo received from FCHR was the forgery. The Pensacola News Journal verified the digital copy they received was not modified after the day it was created and mailed to Jones.
After her firing, Jones launched an independent COVID-19 data dashboard for the state of Florida called Florida COVID Action, which gained her an award from Forbes and recognition by Fortune. A Florida spokesperson criticized Jones's COVID-19 dashboard for including antibody tests, for counting virus tests with antibody tests, and for counting non-resident deaths. In 2020, she secured a partnership between Florida COVID Action and non-profit FinMango on a national project. The COVID Monitor, co-founded by Oscar Wahltinez, a FinMango board member who also worked at Google, used open data to track COVID-19's spread at schools, with the help of Google tools such as Google Cloud. Jones repeatedly mischaracterized this as a partnership with the multinational, to which it protested.