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.
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