Rebekah D. Jones

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. Jones attended Stone High School, where she missed months of school during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. 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 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. In November 2019, she was appointed to a manager role within GIS handling analysis and tracking of environmental health data and health services. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, Discrepancies in death counts from Jones's understanding of the data came from nonresident deaths, which were forwarded to the deceased's home.

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. Several news outlets and public officials have since called her credibility and narrative into question, referring to her as a "fraud," "grifter,"

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. which gained her an award from Forbes and recognition by Fortune. 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.

In March 2023, Jones filed a lawsuit against the Florida Department of Health, the state Surgeon General and a former deputy secretary seeking reinstatement, back wages, compensation for emotional distress and punitive damages for being fired in May 2020. Jones claims that her due process and free speech rights were violated in retaliation for being a whistleblower. On February 25, 2025, Judge Angela Dempsey granted the defendants' motions for summary judgment, ruling that Deputy Secretary of Health Shamarial Roberson and the Florida Department of Health acted lawfully in terminating Rebekah Jones for documented insubordination, and that in the eyes of the court, Rebekah Jones is not a legitimate whistleblower, despite her claims.

Jones also alleged that the governor's office was micromanaging the health department and for misleading the public about the state's vaccination data. These claims were substantiated, but were not a part of the whistleblower complaint Jones filed. The state of Florida settled a public records lawsuit in October 2023 filed by Carlos Guillermo Smith and the non-profit Florida Center for Government Accountability after withholding COVID-19 data from the public.

On July 29, 2026, Florida's First District Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court's summary judgments in favor of the Florida Department of Health, state surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, and former deputy health secretary Shamarial Roberson. The court held that Jones had not made a disclosure protected by Florida's public-sector whistleblower law before her termination and rejected her proposed theory of “preemptive retaliation,” finding that the statute did not cover threatened or anticipated disclosures. The court also affirmed the dismissal of her First Amendment retaliation claims, concluding that her public statements concerning the COVID-19 dashboard were made in her capacity as a Department of Health employee rather than as a private citizen, and that Jones is not and never was a 'whistleblower'.

2022 Congressional candidacy

In May 2021, Jones announced that she would not run for congress, either in Maryland where she was living at the time, or in Florida, stating that she did not feel safe running in Florida, and that she was not well-enough prepared to run in Maryland. A day after her suspension from Twitter in June, she announced her intention to run against incumbent Matt Gaetz in the 2022 U.S. House elections but subsequently downplayed her announcement in another post, saying that if a Republican or Democratic challenger did not appear, "Well, November 2022 is a long ways away". Jones launched her campaign for Florida's first congressional district in July 2021. Although she filed with the FEC as an independent, she later had to change her filing to run as a Democrat due to voting and election law changes enacted before Jones declared her candidacy.

On July 15, 2022, a lawsuit was filed against Jones by her primary campaign opponent, Margaret "Peggy" Schiller and a Northwest Florida resident, asserting that Jones violated a state law that requires someone to be a member of a political party for a full year ahead of qualifying if they are running for that party's nomination. The suit sought an injunction to remove Jones from the primary ballot. She was removed from the ballot on August 5 after a judge ruled she failed to meet political party registration requirements. On August 12, Jones was granted a motion to stay with regards to her appeal of the ruling, allowing her to continue her campaign. On August 23, 2022, she won the Democratic primary election, and ran against Gaetz in the November general election, which she lost on November 8, 2022.

Legal issues

Assault on LSU police officer In Louisiana in 2016 Jones was arrested and charged by the LSU Police Department with one count each of battery on a police officer and remaining after forbidden, plus two counts of resisting arrest after refusing to vacate a LSU office upon being dismissed from her staff position.

Unauthorized access of state computer systems

Armed execution of search warrant (raid) On December 7, 2020, at 8:30 a.m., Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) executed a search warrant upon Jones' home for suspected unauthorized access of Florida Department of Health computer systems. FDLE said in a statement she was suspected of accessing the system to send an unauthorized message, "speak up before another 17,000 people are dead," to members of the State Emergency Response Team on November 10, 2020, which originated from her home's IP address. The execution of the search warrant with armed police officers, widely referred to as a police raid, was defended by the FDLE as necessary due to Jones' criminal history, including a battery charge on a police officer. Her viral tweets of home security footage of the encounter, which prompted the characterization that it was a raid, helped raise more than $200,000 of more than $500,000 on one of her GoFundMe campaigns.

U.S. civil liberties watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation warned about over-reliance on IP addresses and called for the need to reform overbroad computer crime laws. Ars Technica reported that the affidavit had stated that the emergency alert system at the time the unauthorized message was sent used a single username and password. Those credentials were publicly posted on the DOH website during the interval that the unauthorized message was sent.

Arrest and deferred prosecution agreement Jones turned herself in on January 18, 2021, two days after an arrest warrant was issued for Jones by the FDLE following a finding of probable cause that she breached the system, sent the unauthorized message, and illegally downloaded the confidential information of more than 20,000 state employees. On December 8, 2022, she entered into a deferred prosecution agreement to avoid trial, where among other requirements, she would have to admit guilt, pay a $20,000 fine to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, do community service, and see a mental health professional monthly.

Jones posted online that the charges had been dropped, that she never admitted to guilt, and referred to the fine as extortion. The prosecutor of the case said that she mischaracterized the plea agreement. Jones raised more than $10,000 of $352,668 on a GoFundMe campaign in the five days after the agreement was made.

Dropped lawsuit Jones filed a lawsuit on December 20, 2020, against the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Commissioner Rick Swearingen alleging that the police obtained a "sham" search warrant whose true purpose was to retaliate against her. Her suit claimed that one of the FDLE agents grabbed her "without consent, authorization, or legitimate basis" while searching her home. She also alleged that the FDLE violated her First Amendment free speech rights, and had performed an unlawful search and seizure when they confiscated computers and her personal cell phone. Body camera footage was later released by FDLE, though this footage did not show the officers entering the house, as seen in the footage from Jones's home security cameras.

Cyberstalking of FSU student On June 7, 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2019 misdemeanor cyberstalking charge. Beginning in 2017, Jones was accused of harassing and stalking a former student while she was a teacher at FSU. In July 2019, Jones was charged with stalking, cyberstalking, and sexual cyberharassment, after she published revenge porn of the victim and details of their sexual encounters on social media. Other dropped charges related to the case include felony robbery, trespass, criminal mischief, and contempt of court stemming from an alleged violation of a domestic violence restraining order. Jones tweeted that Shamarial Roberson, Florida's deputy secretary for health, was a fraud and a murderer. Jones attacked epidemiologists Natalie Dean and Jason Salemi for disputing the accuracy of Jones' claims. Salemi left Twitter in response to Jones's behavior. Jones also engaged in a feud with Christina Pushaw, who wrote an article critical of Jones. Jones initially referred to Taylor as a "quack" and a "fraud", but as the tracker gained media attention, she tweeted that Taylor and Cole had sexually harassed her, and tagged the university. Jones also emailed Daniel Gropper, the College of Business dean, who escalated the report to the vice president of the university and the chief of the university's police department. The chief asked Jones to substantiate her claims, but received no response. Jones later deleted the tweets and denied engaging in the defamation. DeSantis's office commented upon the suspension, with a spokesperson calling it "long overdue" and accusing Jones of spreading "defamatory conspiracy theories".

In April 2023, Jones tweeted that DeSantis had kidnapped her teenage son; the tweet received tens of millions of views. Jones had turned her son voluntarily into police after the issuance of a valid arrest warrant. Jones used GoFundMe to raise at least $7,000 through her viral Twitter posts. In December 2023, her son pled no contest to threatening a mass shooting. The familial relationship was mentioned by the media because of Jones's public statements about the case.

Public perception Though she was widely referred to as a "whistleblower" and "hero", following official investigations and her Twitter activity, public officials and the media questioned her credibility, referring to her as a "fraud," Fox News reported on a video made by progressive journalist Ana Kasparian in which she apologized for what she said was a bias against DeSantis and failing to do her due diligence on Jones and her claims. Jones's use of multiple GoFundMe campaigns and the manner in which she uses them was criticized by Vice after she Tweeted false claims about her son being kidnapped by the governor of Florida. She was named Forbess 2020 Technology Person of the Year for creating alternative Florida COVID-19 tracking dashboards. She won Constantine Cannon's 2020 Whistleblower of the Year award. In 2023, she was presented with the Martha Mitchell Pillar Award at the Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival.