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Tom McTague
February 26, 2024 21 mins
In six years, Nick Clegg has gone from political has-been to one of the most powerful executives at one of the world’s biggest tech firms: President of Global Affairs at Meta. As one of Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted consiglieri, Clegg reportedly earns over $15 million a year and is tasked with dealing with the politics of its extraordinary global power and wealth. But is “the Foreign Secretary of Facebook” a constraining force on the media behemoth, or an enabling one?
Tom McTague, UnHerd’s Political Editor, has spent months investigating the darker side of Facebook. He has spoken to people in government, finance, tech and the police force, as well as friends of the former deputy prime minister to find out: is Nick Clegg whitewashing Facebook?
1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg
2. The escape from California
3. Clegg battles Britain
4. The rise of Facebook fraud
5. How Clegg wields his superpower
Includes exclusive documentary by Tom McTague:
In six years, Nick Clegg has gone from political has-been to one of the most powerful executives at one of the world’s biggest tech firms: President of Global Affairs at Meta. As one of Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted consiglieri, Clegg reportedly earns over $15 million a year and is tasked with dealing with the politics of its extraordinary global power and wealth. But is “the Foreign Secretary of Facebook” a constraining force on the media behemoth, or an enabling one?
Tom McTague, UnHerd’s Political Editor, has spent months investigating the darker side of Facebook. He has spoken to people in government, finance, tech and the police force, as well as friends of the former deputy prime minister to find out: is Nick Clegg whitewashing Facebook?
1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg
2. The escape from California
3. Clegg battles Britain
4. The rise of Facebook fraud
5. How Clegg wields his superpower
1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg
In July 2018, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was a mid-tier guest speaker at Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s inaugural “Democracy Summit” in Copenhagen. No longer an MP after being unceremoniously dumped from parliament in 2017 by a bar manager now in jail for fraud, Clegg was one of a number of former politicians who, having lost power, believed democracy was in trouble. Also appearing with the former Lib Dem leader were the two headliners that day: Joe Biden and Tony Blair.
The themes of that summit reflected the zeitgeist of the moment: the dangers of fake news and technology, particularly on social media platforms. For much of that year, Facebook had been under intense public scrutiny following revelations that people’s private data had been secretly collected and sold to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The “Cambridge Analytica scandal” had seen Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, dragged before Congress where he had given a hesitant and unconvincing performance in front of the world’s media, becoming a lightning rod for all the anxieties of the moment.
Rasmussen’s Democracy Summit was, then, another potential PR problem for Facebook. Yet, as one of the key sponsors, it also offered an opportunity to show how seriously it was now taking its responsibilities. Facebook’s Vice President of Global Policy Solutions at the time, Richard Allan, headed up the company’s delegation. Allan was the former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam who gave up his seat for Clegg in 2005, acted as his campaign manager, and was then granted a peerage by the Coalition in 2010. Also in attendance was Facebook’s former vice president, Joanna Shields, who had also been given a peerage under the Coalition, becoming a minister under David Cameron and then Theresa May’s “special representative on internet crime and harms”.
So, while Clegg was a rather bruised former politician, he remained a very well-connected one. When the conference ended, he did not even have to sort his own travel home: Blair offered him a lift back to London in his private jet. Here was a taste of the gilded life he might aspire to in his political retirement, the life of a former politician no longer constrained by democracy.
But Clegg, thanks to that summit, has taken quite a different path from almost any previous British politician. He had never been that interested in technology, according to those who know him. But as Allan told me recently: “The event was one of those moments which helped Nick understand how politically significant all this was.” Within a few months, Clegg had joined Facebook, and relocated to the US. He has since risen to become one of the most senior executives at its parent group, Meta — no longer merely deputy prime minister of the UK, but, according to those I spoke to in Whitehall, effectively “Foreign Secretary of Facebook”.
Clegg’s importance at Meta was revealed last year when he negotiated both his return to London and promotion to “President of Global Affairs”; a position which reportedly earns him upwards of $15 million a year. Six years after his career low-point, Clegg is now Zuckerberg’s trusted consigliere, the political representative for a $1 trillion corporate behemoth. He is the man paid to ensure Zuckerberg is not exposed to the sort of political scandal that dragged his name through the mud in 2018.
In short, Clegg has it all: not only the kind of power, wealth and settled family life back in London that few former politicians could ever dream of, but also his reputation repaired and even enhanced. No longer a humiliated political loser, he is now the man tasked with making the world’s most important media company more socially responsible and saving democracy from the populists in the process.
While Clegg remains relatively guarded about this new life — he would not agree to be interviewed for this piece — his wife Miriam González Durántez’s Instagram page is like a show reel for what it all looks like. There he is with his wife one moment, hiking in Africa, smiling for the camera, soaked in the mists of Victoria Falls; then in the United States; and then back in England walking in the countryside. “Happy birthday Nick Clegg!” Miriam writes below one image of the pair of them. “Life with you is an incredible journey.”
“Y’all shooting Clarkson’s farm?” one of Miriam’s friends jokes in reply to her birthday post, the rolling English countryside clearly visible behind them. “I’ve watched two episodes and I’m hooked!” Miriam replies. “At least it’s anti-Brexit!!” For Miriam the nature of her husband’s departure from politics — and what came soon after — remains a source of bitterness. Under a news story that she posted on her Instagram feed about David Cameron returning to frontline politics as foreign secretary, she remarks, “Clearly getting bored at home,” before adding, acidly: “And yet home is where he truly belongs.” When a friend replies, “I thought it was George O you really hated”, Miriam posts a laughing emoji. When another adds, “what a joke of a man”, Miriam responds with a heart.
But is her husband really so different from Cameron? “The only difference,” one senior government minister said to me, “is that David is back in government trying to launder his reputation — whereas Nick is selling his to launder somebody else’s.”
This is central to any consideration of Clegg’s new life: is he really the liberal constraining influence on Meta that his defenders claim, the man making Facebook that little bit more responsible for the good of us all? Or is he, actually, an enabling force, giving a veneer of respectability to a company that is so big it has moved beyond the control of mere national governments and remains just as socially irresponsible as ever? For, according to those I have spoken to in the British Government and law enforcement over the past few months, Meta’s influence is not becoming more benign under Clegg — quite the opposite.
I was told by a senior minister that, in the UK today, 10% of all crime happens on a Meta platform. “That’s not online crime,” he said, “but all crime.” And it is getting worse. Not only has online fraud exploded on Facebook marketplace, but child exploitation is being made easier by Meta’s decision to ignore pleas from law enforcement agencies and government ministers not to roll out “end-to-end encryption” across its platforms, in effect making it much easier for paedophiles to groom and abuse children without anyone knowing. “They are responsible for an awful lot of harm in this country,” another minister told me.
And yet what is being done about it? According to those I spoke to in government, Britain has become a global soft touch for online criminals, attracted to the country by the ease of operating in English, our economic openness, speed of online payments — and, crucially, the utter inability of the state to do anything about it.
2. The escape from California
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Clegg’s time in California was important, say those who know him, because it allowed him to get close to Facebook’s “C-suite” executives — in particular, Zuckerberg himself. For much of this time, his boss was Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s all-powerful number two. When she stepped down in the summer of 2022, Zuckerberg relied instead on a team of lieutenants, one of whom was Clegg. With this direct relationship established, Clegg felt secure enough to move back to Britain.
According to Meta, he only occasionally interacts directly with the British Government — his job is now too important for that. “He spends most of his life on a plane,” I was told. In January, he was in Switzerland for meetings about AI; in December, in Brussels to talk to the EU; in October, Greece for another summit about democracy; and over the summer, India, where he was greeted like a visiting head of state.
Clegg’s job at Meta is to set overall strategy for dealing with the world’s most powerful regulators, oversee Meta’s own governance strategy and manage the politics that inevitably come with its extraordinary global influence and wealth. In total, there are now 3 billion “monthly active users” on Facebook, 2 billion on WhatsApp and 1 billion on Instagram. If Meta is now the size of a country, Clegg is both its cabinet secretary and its chief diplomat.
As such, Meta is not just another social media company, but a monster of global proportions: an international news platform, publisher, marketplace and advertising giant all rolled into one, used not just by ordinary people, but also by criminal gangs, sexual predators, authoritarian governments and terrorists. Indeed, one of Meta’s own lines of defence is that its very size is the reason why so much crime happens on its platforms.
Clegg’s defenders argue that, since joining Meta in 2018, he has moved the company away from its more libertarian instincts towards a more “mature, sensible place”, where it apparently acts more proactively in addressing public concerns about its role in things such as deep fakes, sexual exploitation and fraud. He has, they say, been instrumental in making Meta less hostile to regulation while creating new layers of governance for the platforms. He created the independent “Oversight Board” which now makes decisions on free speech and content on Facebook and Instagram, and which has been filled with unimpeachably liberal bigwigs such as the former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who lives in London, and the former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. These are Clegg’s people.
The Oversight Board has certainly helped to reduce the kind of political controversy over Facebook censorship which dogged the company during Clegg’s early years, when Donald Trump was removed from the site. Yet this innovation also points to the question about Clegg’s influence. “I mean, come on,” said one of the senior UK government figures I spoke to. “Does anyone really believe the ethics board is anything more than a rubber stamp for the same old West Coast liberal politics the company has always had?” To Clegg’s critics, in other words, it’s all just window dressing for the same corporate interest.
Over the past months, I have spoken to more than a dozen figures in government, finance, tech and police, as well as those who know Clegg personally, to try to understand how much he has really managed to achieve at Meta. Those who have come across him at work describe the same figure who burst into the public consciousness in 2010: fluent, charming, persuasive, normal.
One British minister who had dealt with Clegg in government told me he was the same as ever, only now with the air of corporate power behind him. Another MP said he was “charming but defensive” when representing Meta. Another who met him in California told me that while he was thriving professionally in the US, he was clearly out of place in Silicon Valley’s deracinated suburbia, too far removed from the Victorian warmth of south-west London where the family had made their home and to which they have now returned — albeit to a new £8 million home in Chiswick.
Clegg and his wife disliked the scale of urban poverty in California that sat alongside the kind of extraordinary tech wealth that they were benefiting from. Both felt that their time in the US had confirmed how European they were and, while they might hate Brexit and the Conservative Government, London was nevertheless home. While they were there, Miriam lectured on international trade policy at Stanford University, but she has her own political ambitions in Europe. Since returning, she has created a new political movement — or “nascent political party” as one friend described it — called España Mejor, or “Better Spain”.
It was always the pair’s Europeanness that made Clegg such an attractive prospect for Zuckerberg. He is, explains one friend, fluent in European in a way Zuckerberg is not.
3. Clegg battles Britain
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“The tech industry needs to work together to fight predatory adults online,” Clegg tweeted in November. “That’s why Meta is a founding member of the Tech Coalition’s new Lantern programme, which will allow companies to share signals about predatory behaviour & take action on their respective platforms.”
A month later, Meta announced that it was rolling out end-to-end encryption for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook, meaning, as it boasted at the time, “the content of your messages and calls with friends and family are protected from the moment they leave your device to the moment they reach the receiver’s device”. As a result, “nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said”.
For years the British Government had been lobbying Meta not to go through with this plan. Today, Britain receives around 800 referrals every month from the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an organisation which trawls the internet looking for evidence of child exploitation. When NCMEC finds evidence of wrongdoing it passes it on to national crime agencies around the world who then go to arrest the abusers operating in their country. As a result of these 800 referrals, around 1,200 children are protected from predatory adults every month. By rolling out end-to-end encryption, the UK Government believes this number will collapse overnight.
In 2022, there were around 32 million reports of online child sexual exploitation made to NCMEC — 21 million of which came from Meta. When I put this to Meta, they pointed to comments by the NCMEC executive John Shehan, who recently praised the company for going “above and beyond” in their search for online child sexual exploitation while other companies did not, and there seems to be some truth in this. While Facebook referred 21 million reports to NCMEC in 2022, Google reported 2.2 million, TikTok 290,000 and X just under 100,000. Apple reported just 234. And yet, by rolling out end-to-end encryption, Meta has, in effect, wilfully blinded itself to at least some of what is happening on its platforms, even if it insists there is still much they can do to combat child sexual exploitation.
A Meta spokesman told me: “We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent and combat abuse while maintaining online security.” Here is classic Cleggite third-wayism. Meta points to things such as enforcing age limits, using technology to scour for suspicious behaviour and stopping adults contacting children they don’t know. The company says, for instance, that it can block anyone over 19 from starting a direct conversation on Instagram with children they don’t follow. Meta also says it has developed technology to identify “suspicious adults” — for example, if they’ve recently been reported or blocked by a teen — which would prevent them from finding, following and interacting with teen accounts. But if adults are this suspect why aren’t they just thrown off Facebook altogether?
Another safety feature Meta boasts about are the “safety notices” it sends to teenagers if they are talking to suspicious adults. In just one month last year, 85 million users apparently saw such safety notices. And yet, as a parent, it is hard to feel reassured by such statistics rather than simply terrified at the scale of potential abuse. Other defenders of Meta argue that end-to-end encryption does not disempower the police. Encrypting messages does not stop undercover police entering WhatsApp groups or seizing mobile phones. Meta insists that overall, even with end-to-end encryption, it expects to continue providing more reports of potential child sexual exploitation than other social media companies. We shall see.
The British Government, at least, is far from convinced. In the autumn of 2022, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, held a video call with Clegg about the issue. In this meeting, Clegg claimed Meta was being unfairly targeted because it was making the majority of referrals to NCMEC. From the British Government’s perspective, though, this was exactly the point — it is making so many referrals because there is so much abuse happening, which will now be harder to do anything about. The discussion ultimately ended without agreement: the UK Government insisted that it was possible to protect privacy and child safety by developing new technology to sit alongside end-to-end encryption. Clegg insisted that it was not.
It looks, to those in government, like Clegg has absorbed the prevailing libertarian orthodoxy of California: an orthodoxy which places privacy above all else. In Silicon Valley, there is an arms race to offer customers total privacy in their private communications, no matter the cost. For the British Government, the cost of such unbreakable privacy is simply too high. Instead, it believes technological solutions are possible that allow social media companies to scan for illegal material on encrypted platforms, while also maintaining privacy. “We know it’s possible, because GCHQ says it is,” one government figure told me. The British state, in other words, had developed the technology itself. Meta says most experts disagree.
After Braverman and Clegg’s discussion in 2022, the pair did not meet until 2023. In the meantime Braverman ordered the Home Office to produce a public campaign directed against Meta’s planned roll out of end-to-end encryption which would target Zuckerberg directly, pleading with him “as a father” to change course. The plan, in effect, was to launch a coordinated government attack on the Facebook founder to shame him into action by turning public opinion against him. But, then, Rishi Sunak ordered Braverman to pull the campaign.
Why would he do this? On this point there remains a fierce dispute between ministers. Some see something nefarious — Sunak eyeing a future career like Clegg’s — others the power of the Treasury, others mere political tactics or Sunak’s weakness. What is certainly true is that there was a campaign and then there was not.
It was also at this time that the Government began trying to reassure Meta about the measures contained within its then-controversial Online Safety Bill, which was making its way through parliament. Under the Bill’s provisions, social media companies such as Meta would be responsible for the content on their platforms and would have a new duty to “identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm” from illegal content and “activity that is harmful to children”. The legislation also gave the powers to enforce this to Ofcom, the media regulator. Ofcom, the act states, could order Meta to use “accredited technology” to look for and take down child sexual abuse material on its platforms, and also to levy fines up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenue.
Facing this threat, in March 2023, Meta warned it would pull WhatsApp from the UK if the proposed measures in the Bill were not removed. But, then, in September — just as the row between Braverman and Clegg was reaching its climax — the Government moved to reassure Meta and the other social media companies that Ofcom would only be able to force them to scan WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook for illegal content if that was “technically feasible”, which Meta insists it is not. In the end, the Bill received royal assent in October without the changes once demanded by Meta, but with responsibility for dealing with the problem kicked over to Ofcom.
No one knows how Ofcom will use its new powers — or how powerful the new law will actually be. One thing we do know is that since the passage of the Online Safety Act in September, Meta has not only not pulled WhatsApp from the UK but has felt free to push ahead with the roll out of end-to-end encryption across its other services. “The truth is we’re too scared and timid,” said one government figure involved at the time. “As ever.”
When I opened my phone this weekend, I noticed a little message on WhatsApp. “We’re updating our Terms of Service and making relevant changes to our Privacy Policies for UK users, effective 11 April 2024,” the note read. The changes are necessary, it went on, “to reflect that the minimum age to use WhatsApp in the UK will be changed from 16 to 13″.
4. The rise of Facebook fraud
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Alongside the Online Safety Act, the principal challenge for Meta over the past year has been the growing anger over the explosion of fraud on its platforms, particularly Facebook. According to the Government, fraud now accounts for 40% of all crime in England and Wales, 70% of which comes from abroad with as much as 80% happening online — the vast majority on social media. In recent evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, the TSB’s Financial Crime Prevention Director, Paul Davis, said 80% of the fraud they saw originated on social media, before adding: “Let’s not walk past the fact that when I say ‘social media’, the majority of them start from the channels owned by one company in particular, which is Meta.” Baroness Nicky Morgan, chair of the House of Lords Fraud Act Committee, told Meta that she had received written evidence from high-street banks that in one three month period alone, 70% of all cases of investment fraud started on Facebook or Instagram, either through adverts or victims being directly messaged.
The police are seeing the use of social media and “encrypted messaging services” like WhatsApp by criminals “increasing throughout all aspects of fraud”.
While Clegg sets Meta’s overall political strategy, he tends to defer the job of defending Meta’s interests in the UK to the team he has assembled in London, most of whom also used to work in Whitehall.
Meta’s director of public policy in London is Chris Yiu, a former No. 10 adviser and Treasury official who went on to become one of the most influential figures at the Tony Blair Institute (TBI). Yiu is credited within the TBI as being the man who convinced Blair of the revolutionary potential of technology, setting him off on his journey towards Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who now funds most of his work calling for much greater use of technology by government. Yiu remains close to Blair, becoming one of the TBI’s board members in 2022, a position he still holds, alongside his job at Meta.
Alongside Yiu, there’s Rebecca Stimson, who was in the Cabinet Office during the Coalition as a senior EU policy advisor to Cameron. Then there’s Richard Earley, Meta’s “Head of UK Content Regulation Policy”, who also worked in the Cabinet Office with Clegg during the Coalition, and Philip Milton, who does much of the direct interaction with the Government on the issue of online fraud. Before joining Meta, Milton previously worked at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, “with responsibility for e-Privacy, Data Protection and Net Neutrality policy”, and before that at the Serious Fraud Office. For Meta, Whitehall is less a revolving door than a one-stop shop from which to poach its lobbyists.
When Milton appeared before the House of Lords in 2022, he claimed that dealing with online fraud was Meta’s “number one priority”. “Without our users, our platforms cease to exist, it is as simple as that,” he said. “Even if they do not necessarily fall victim to fraud, the very presence of it degrades users’ experience, and it makes it an unattractive place for advertisers to use as well.”
Yet, according to those I spoke to within the British Government, Facebook has been the slowest and least effective of all the Big Tech companies in reducing fraud on its platforms. When Google changed its algorithm so that it would only take adverts from investment products regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, the amount of online fraud coming from the site collapsed to almost zero. Meta, in contrast, dragged its feet and is only now doing something similar.
Far from being motivated to act, one senior government insider told me, Meta’s business model and sheer size meant it was, in fact, incentivised to move much more slowly than other companies. “If you are eBay or Gumtree, then fraud on your marketplace is a real problem because it’s your bread and butter,” they explained. “For Meta, they are ultimately an advertising company, so eyeballs on site is what they need, so the incentives are completely different.”
Meta’s principle strategy was to avoid any new legal obligations imposed upon it to deal with the fraud — or, more specifically, any new legal liabilities to recompense those who had been defrauded through its sites.
Today, pressure for the Government to do something is not just coming from consumers who have been ripped off online, but from Britain’s powerful banking sector, which has become incensed at the amount of money it is having to pay out in compensation to those defrauded on social media. The issue has become more acute because of a new regulatory regime coming into force in October this year, which will mean almost everyone who is defrauded online will be entitled to a full reimbursement. At the moment, most banks voluntarily reimburse their customers, covering around two-thirds of all fraud cases. Under the Government’s new rules, however, almost all claims up to £415,000 will be covered — some 99% of all cases — with the cost of the compensation split 50/50 between the bank of the fraud victim and the bank of the fraud thief. The social media platform on which the fraud took place will not have to pay a penny.
To deal with this discrepancy, there has been a growing push inside the Government for tighter rules on tech companies — Meta in particular — to force them to clamp down on the fraud on their sites. The Government has had two “anti-fraud champions” over the past year or so — Anthony Browne and then Simon Fell. Both have publicly backed calls for the burden of compensation to be shared between the banks and social media companies. For Meta, this is not just a financial irritation but also a potential legal principle that could become a new gold standard across the world.
Before the party conference season last year, formal proposals went into No. 10 that included a recommendation that the Government look again at “burden-sharing” as part of a new Online Fraud Charter. According to one minister, two of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers — James Nation, deputy head of the policy unit, and Will Tanner, deputy chief of staff — were demanding the Government “push hard in this space”.
And yet, when the Charter was eventually published in November, there was no mention of it. Instead, the Charter was a kind of voluntary compact between the Government and tech firms to do more to deal with fraud, with a review to take place in six months to see how they are getting on. The tech companies — and Meta — had dodged a bullet. “The lack of anything in the Fraud Strategy caused quite a stir from the financial services sector,” the minister told me.
Even getting Meta to accept some responsibility for the content on its platforms took an enormous effort and the direct lobbying of Clegg to get it over the line. “It is the first time they have ever accepted responsibility for what is on their platforms,” one insider said, “so it’s a big mental boundary that they’ve crossed, which we shouldn’t overlook.”
In the run-up to this turning point last year, Clegg spoke to Bob Wigley, Chair of UK Finance, after which he ordered a number of his juniors to engage directly with Anthony Browne, the Government’s then anti-fraud champion. Following one such meeting, Browne wrote to Clegg directly to say he was “very pleased with the new identification measures that Meta is taking to combat fraud on your platforms” and that he was “confident they will have a real impact, and benefit millions of your users in the UK”. He concluded: “Thank you for your constructive approach and taking the issue with the seriousness it deserves.”
Meta says that while the Government has not made it financially liable for site fraud, the Online Safety Act does list fraud among the harms social media companies have a duty to combat — with fines of up to 10% of its global turnover if it does not. Meta also insists that the commitments it has made in the Online Fraud Charter are significant. For instance, it will soon be rolling out “increased verification” on Facebook Marketplace, introducing warning messages to encourage users never to pay for an item without seeing it first. But why has it taken so long to get here? And if it takes the threat of government action to do it, why aren’t we demanding more laws with more bite all over again?
According to a number of insiders involved in the process, the real brake on imposing burden sharing was the Treasury and Jeremy Hunt in particular. “It was a combination of the two of them,” said one government figure. The Treasury does not want to impose financial burdens that make Britain less attractive for inward investment, particularly from tech companies. A second figure confirmed that the reason the social companies had escaped without any new liabilities for the fraud was because of “competitiveness issues”. A third said: “As ever, the Treasury is reluctant to choke off any potential UK investors with what they see as punitive measures.”
For Hunt, personally, one of his central objectives as Chancellor is to make London and “the triangle” with Oxford and Cambridge “the Silicon Valley of Europe”. In his Autumn Statement, he boasted that Britain already had the “third largest technology sector in the world, double the size of Germany and three times the size of France”, but wanted to go further. Meta has already invested heavily in London, with a big new campus at King’s Cross, one on Rathbone Place and another on Warren Street. It is from Warren Street in particular that Clegg is able to “hot desk” whenever he goes into the office. Hunt’s vision has also been embraced by Sunak, the tech bro with a place and a former career in California.
And so, what is the result? Next month the UK Government is hosting the first ever Global Fraud Summit in London, attended by interior ministers and figures from Interpol, the EU Commission and the UN. And who has been asked to give a presentation on how to share intelligence? Meta.
5. How Clegg wields his superpower
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If Nick Clegg has a superpower, it is surely the illusion of normality. He is the public schoolboy in an M&S pullover helping to run one of the world’s great hegemons. It was this ordinariness that once made him politically popular, but which also contributed to the ferocity of the backlash when it came. The country had briefly fallen in love with this new Blair, only for him to let them down, just like the old one.
His skill as a politician was to always adopt the demeanour of the most sensible person in the room, neither irresponsibly libertarian nor hysterically conservative. It is the same trick he plays today. When Clegg bemoans those fixated on “speculative future risks about AI models that currently do not exist”, this may sound like third-way centrism, but it is also no coincidence that this reflects Meta’s corporate interest in maintaining a light-touch regulatory system for as long as possible.
Again and again, Clegg has adopted the same strategy: shepherding Meta into a place where it can say it is already regulating itself — and so does not need sweeping new regulations imposed upon it. But all the while, things are getting worse online, not better, and Clegg is the man ultimately responsible for Meta’s overall political strategy — a strategy which, I was told by four separate figures from within the UK Government, was self-interested, slow and resistant to any real democratic challenge, reticent to do anything which affects its corporate bottom line or sets damaging regulatory precedents which could be adopted elsewhere.
“There’s no question in my mind that he is an enabler,” one former colleague at Meta told me. “The only question is whether he realises it or not.”
Far from a burnt-out politician, Clegg is now a private citizen with extraordinary power and responsibility, paid a fortune to promote the interests of a company whose policies affect the lives of billions. If the US Congress can hold Zuckerberg to account, why isn’t the British Parliament doing the same to Clegg?
But it is also true that when trying to piece together his influence, the British Government has also shown itself to be as full of contradictions as Meta. During my conversations I heard how unimportant Clegg was to Zuckerberg, a figure to be held in contempt for selling his reputation for money. But I was also told how instrumental he was in dragging Meta over the line to sign the Online Fraud Charter. Meanwhile, some ministers boasted about how the Government had refused to give in to threats from Meta, while others lamented how ineffective they had been. Some blamed the Treasury, others No. 10 and others still a general mindset of British state weakness, made worse by splits within the Cabinet between security-conscious departments such as the Home Office and rivals such as the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
For all this pointless squabbling, a simple reality remains: Clegg might be an influential figure in a giant corporation, but the British Government is responsible for the laws which apply in Britain. If Britain is a soft touch, that is the Government’s fault. The question of whether he is a restrainer or an enabler is, then, moot: he is, inevitably, both. The real question is one of power. Clegg and the British Government have it. And we should be angrier with both for how they use it.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.
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SubscribeAn impressively researched article, imo. For what it’s worth, I would ascribe the UK’s unwillingness to aggressively police the tech companies as a function of state weakness. Western countries are in an economic doom spiral for reasons exhaustively discussed on Unherd. As the article suggests, I doubt they want to deter any potential source of inward investment.
“I would ascribe the UK’s unwillingness to aggressively police the tech companies as a function of state weakness.” No, it is in the self-interest of politicians to allow Tech companies to censor their critics. It is a conspiracy.
It’s certainly curious how authoritarian countries like China and Russia seem capable of keeping these tech companies in check, yet we cannot. This is *not* a recommendation for China or Russia. More an observation on whta is actually possible and how spineless governments in the West are.
“10% of all crime happens on a Meta platform”, including clearly vast level of online fraud, and abuse of children. The costs of policing this level of crime – to the extent it is policed at all – falls on the Exchequer, yet in 2021 Facebook UK paid just £29m in corporation tax on sales of over £3.3bn. Such Corporation Tax as Meta does pay is diverted to low tax jurisdictions such as Ireland. The Irish operation is so profitable, Irish based employees in Meta have been awarded stock options worth collectively $829m, or $276,000 per employee, while a senior Meta executive like Clegg can buy an £8m house with six months’ salary. Meanwhile British High Street retailers stagger under the burden of the highest business rates in Europe, and taxes on individuals and businesses without Meta’s lobbying power continue to grow, with less and less to show for it.
Tech giants structure their affairs to minimise tax. That surely can’t come as any surprise to anybody.
In 2018 Google, representing several big tech companies, visited HM Treasury and the European Commission to threaten the crippling of their economies by digital isolation if they continued to lead international efforts to clarify in-border economic activity for accurate taxation of activity. This wasn’t lobbying. This wasn’t even essential to the continued mega profitability of Google. This is a commercial war being waged on nation states and their citizens. Later that year plans to tackle the enormous distortions in the rules for transfer pricing were watered down, leaving the bottom lines of Google and co unchanged. .
Few people realise how vulnerable the business model is. It’s all based on pay-per-click and the advertising revenue and bulk data thereby generated. If everyone who hates these sinister and manipulative businesses was willing to spend a few minutes each day clicking on those links without buying anything they could be quite quickly destroyed.
Clicking on pay-per- click links without buying will simply add to Google’s etc profits at the expense of the advertisers
Not once advertisers realise what’s happening. Most of the larger accounts monitor their conversion rates 24/7 and have elaborate alerts set up on them.
Aren’t public companies obliged to minimise tax/maximise profit for the shareholders benefit by law?
No, but that is a common misunderstanding. The idea that a corporation’s board of directors has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder returns was put out by Milton Friedman, as if it were carved in stone, but the truth is that the legal responsibility of the board of directors is to maintain the health of the corporation. Of course, if the corporation is intended to make a profit, that means the board should work with that in mind. But it does not mean they should maximize short-term gains at the expense of the corporation’s long-term well-being.
But Friedman’s ideas (part of the Chicago school of economics) took hold in the late 1970s and contributed to an onslaught of ‘corporate raiders’ who bought out corporations using enormously leveraged loans and then quickly sold off the assets of the corporations to pay the raiders’ huge debts, at the same time leaving the raiders with very large profits. Hence the moniker, ‘vulture capitalists’. Today those raiders are generally camouflaged as ‘hedge funds’ or ‘private asset management firms’. Still, the same mindset prevails.
“Of course, if the corporation is intended to make a profit, that means the board should work with that in mind. But it does not mean they should maximize short-term gains at the expense of the corporation’s long-term well-being.”
Friedman would have agreed with this statement. His views in this regard have often been truncated by those who like to accuse him of having encouraged companies to overemphasize shareholders to the neglect of other stakeholders. He did no such thing.
I don’t get it. The author is arguing against more robust encryption. We need more privacy, not less!!! Tech companies will simply have to find alternative ways to protect children. The govt certainly isn’t thinking about children when it opposes greater privacy. It’s thinking about itself:
Exactly right! The idea that UK governments of all persuasions are really concerned with child protection on the internet when they were utterly uninterested in mass grooming and rape in Rochdale and other places despite the many warnings, is ridiculous.
Yes, this is exactly right. It’s always either terrorism or “protect the kiddies” whenever the state wants to expand their power. End to end encryption is essential to protect privacy.
SEE ABOVE: if you can encrypt it someone else can de encrypt it
Depends on the strength of encryption used and just how long the “someone else” is prepared to wait and how much compute horsepower they’ve got.
It wasn’t the “British government” but the police, social services and councils. We don’t live in China!
The trouble remains the same: if you can encrypt it someone else can de encrypt it – or even creat an illusory encryption like encrochat which take the leg work out of de-encryption! (or should that be Clegg work?). There were times in the early days of modems, wincc and compuserve when criminals were ahead of law enforcers, as were bank robbers in ante-bellum USA. Then came the Pinkertons. If ppl are stupid enough to use fakebook or whatscrap its really up to them. There will always be zuckbergs and cleggs around who can’t see past the bill fold and enable paedos or frauds for profit. That is a seperate issue from the tech-bro penetration of civic society and not difficult to control in a jurisdiction with robust law – PRC is a good example – no photo id an dproof of address/bank – no Weibo or Wechat. If you want to avoid such hazards i suggest you write stuff down and burn after reading or write it on your hand and wash it off with swarfiga.
it’s OK, ‘decrypt’ is a perfectly valid word for making encrypted text legible.
thanks
Tech company anbility to protect kids are like PPE. Wearing safety glasses won’t help you if you fall of a cliff.
Why do you have this view? You are concerned about the welfare of children, but everyone else is acting in bad faith?! Except possibly Donald Trump! This is just a silly way of dividing the world into goodies and baddies!
But is “the Foreign Secretary of Facebook” a constraining force on the media behemoth, or an enabling one?
Don’t know, but I’m hoping he can do for Meta what he did for Britain.
Act as a constraining force on the Tories?
What Tories? Are there any left?
No, I mean provide leadership, style, panache, grit….
Revelations 13:15, talks of Clegg and his bosses
” The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.”
Here it comes….. and these guys serve the beasts. I know you all think, Just old religion stuff – well past its time. But then – it is a useful way to look at modern times. See that phone in your hand?
Talk of the devil… see the one in yours?
Ok so ‘two wrongs’ then…
I like the analogy!
We need to do something before it is too late, maybe the cost of lockdown crisis will stop us buying stuff? Zuckerburg needs to go…
I actually came away with a renewed respect for Zuckerburg. I had no idea just how much pressure he was under from the state to not enable encryption. He showed some real backbone to protect us little people from state surveillance.
To paraphrase Jacob Miller’s wise words – facebook man can’t send him message in peace – too much informer and too much beast.
The political editor of what’s supposed to be “Unherd” has just written a very long essay on the evils of Facebook, apparently after many months of investigation. Said political editor fails to mention:
a) the role that the US government played in helping to create Facebook.
b) PRISM, the program in which Facebook is a key participant, through which the US National Security Agency collects data on social media users. [See Yasha Levine’s excellent “Surveillance Valley: A Secret Military History of the Internet”].
c) the incestuous relationship between big tech companies and governments in silencing critics of corporate-political response to what they describe as “the pandemic” (soon, perhaps, to be known as “Pandemic 1”).
d) the surveillance capitalism business model in which social media users are corralled by manipulative behavioural psychology into maximising revenues of their corporate overlords, rendering them less able to think and act independently, including, conveniently for the ruling classes, in the political sphere.
Instead he focuses almost exclusively on how Meta’s supposed libertarianism and privacy protections are harming children, and how lax content control is facilitating fraud (and some boring stuff about a boring ex-politician). But what about the responsibilities of parents to safeguard their kids? (If you don’t want them using WhatsApp until they are sixteen, don’t give them a blinking phone! They’ll thank you for it later in life). And what about the complicity of governments in rendering citizens more vulnerable to fraudulent ads, having deployed the same psychologically manipulative tactics (cf appeal to ego, affect, incentives, norms eg etc) to deceive them into a set of false beliefs about the world in a misguided and vain attempt to “keep them safe”?
By the end it left me thinking – is UnHerd just one those second or third nets used to catch people who escaped the Guardian, presenting itself as a free-thinking, liberty-oriented forum with some genuinely interesting and challenging authors and articles, priming itself to be used as means of narrative control when the screws really get turned on liberal democratic norms in whatever crisis is served up next?
Come on, Tom. Prove me wrong. You, and all the good people at UnHerd can do better than this.
Very well said.
You make many good points about the behavior of the social media companies, but I’m not sure I agree with your criticism of the current article. The author chose to focus on one aspect of Meta’s behavior as it relates to on-line safety of children, and to the role of one former politician. He wrote a well-researched essay on that rather narrow subject, and his essay fits easily with the many other articles and books out there describing the corrosive effects of social media companies on society. If the author wanted to write more, his article would have to become a book.
Thanks. Fair points. But for me the article lacked balance. Crucially it’s inaccurate, in my view, to characterise Meta as part of a “prevailing libertarian orthodoxy” which prides privacy above else. That’s how they might like to be perceived, but it is certainly not what they actually are.
I think UnHerd does a grand job given its financial limits, but It’s unfair to expect a minnow to take on a Blue Whale and win.
Kill the www! Life was so much better without it!
Damn right!
IN WHICH the supposedly fabulous Unherd proves itself no less dependent on madly fantasizing about sexual abuse of “children” than any other sensationalist organ. If this is journalism i want my money back!
BRING ON THOSE ILLICIT SEXUAL THRILLS
This may be indelicate but, are you by any chance a nonce?
You are right to be cautious of Nick Clegg. He seems to have made his way to the top of the LibDems while having no idea what the LibDems stood for.
Example: This is the man who signed pledges that the LibDems would not raise student loan levels and then, once in power, decided overnight that his party had made a mistake and agreed to the rise.
It would have been possible for him to bemoan the rise, say that LibDems had opposed it, but emphasise his commitment to Cabinet government. He did not.
Obviously this is only one example, but it is highly illustrative.
In 1988 the Liberal/SDP Alliance lost because the electorate did not know what they stood for. In the 1990s, under Paddy Ashdown, that set of values was emerging and elections were more successful.
Later leaders failed to develop this set of ‘themes and values’ and they were destroyed by Clegg to the point that the LibDems could be easily decimated by the Tories in 2015.
Ho Hum.
Clegg, Cameron, Bliar.
A trio of anti-democratic, unwelcome and seemingly unflushable t*rds. In fact the only larger deposits are in their bank accounts.
Not the size of a country. More the size of an supranational religious institution. The equivalent of the monastic institutions of the medieval era.
Real power is never given
It can only be seized
Cleggy’s reincarnation defies all logic.
Like most people who follow British politics, I assumed that Cameron bag-carrier and Coalition TeaBoy would be the high water mark of Nick Clegg’s career. Who ever could have guessed that he would end up wielding far more influence over our online and future lives, than any politician of his generation?
His initial role at Facebook seemed to be as a media decoy-duck for the Zuckerburg menace. Like a food-taster for an unloved potentate of old. What had this billionaire possibly seen in him, we wondered? Perhaps it was Clegg’s ability to look sad that had caught the eye of Zuckerburg, a man who appears incapable of projecting any human emotion. Regardless, it was certain to fantastically well-remunerated.
But the Cleggster’s influence has only grown – how? This was a chap whose party was so irrelevant they didn’t even have to pretend to be credible, just so long as their policies sounded consoling to like-minded woolly-liberals in socks-and-sandals at one of their interminable meetings. But then the Lib-Dems went into coalition with a Tory Govt and their cosy assumptions ran face-first into the pragmatic realities of actually having to deliver. At which point all their principles were promptly jettisoned and the party became a pariah. Not even Nick Clegg’s ‘Sorry face’ could get them out of that.
So what is his secret? Tom McTague suggests “If Nick Clegg has a superpower, it is surely the illusion of normality.”
Actually, I think his superpower is the illusion of sincerity.
On the surface, Sir Nick still manages to do a passing impersonation of earnest good faith, but in reality he’s one of the most hypocritical politicians of our times. I’d honestly trust Tony Blair before I believed anything that came from this arch Illiberal Anti-Democrat.
Leaving aside the obvious examples from his time in politics like Tuition fees, PR or boundary changes, just look at his various positions on the referendum and its aftermath:
He wrote in a Lib Dem party leaflet: “That’s why the Liberal Democrats want a real referendum on Europe. Only a real referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU will let the people decide our country’s future. But Labour don’t want the people to have their say. The Conservatives only support a limited referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Why won’t they give the people a say in a real referendum?”
Similar sentiments appeared 2 years later in the Lib Dem manifesto.
Strangely, by the time the Conservatives offered up a referendum as a manifesto pledge, Sir Nick had changed his tune. Opposing the idea and since then denouncing the referendum as merely an internal Tory party squabble – as though his own party and Labour hadn’t also promised one.
Addressing the Oxford Union in the run up to the referendum, he made fun of any Leavers who didn’t accept the result because he was sure Remain had it in the bag, “There’ll be some people who’ll be like those Japanese soldiers who continued fighting the last war because no one had told them it had ended on some Pacific island, who will carry on arguing and arguing. The rest of us will just move on and carry on with the rest of our lives”.
Well, Banzai to that, Nick!
After the vote he initially said he totally respected the result of the referendum.
He then called on Parliament to ignore the result of the referendum.
When that failed he called on the House of Lords – and then the courts – to overturn the result.
In his campaign to delegitimise the very referendum he had spent years calling for, he then announced to anyone who’d listen that ‘referendums aren’t a sensible way to decide policy’ ….. before (surprise, surprise) going on to call for …. yup …. you guessed it …… another referendum, to decide the issue.
He insisted to Andrew Neill that the reason he thought the referendum vote shouldn’t be allowed to stand is that “no one .. ever made the point to voters” that “a vote to Leave would entail leaving the Single market and Customs Union” …… before having to admit that, actually, yes, he had in fact seen all the senior figures of the Leave campaign making precisely that point in televised interviews and debates. Then, in an hilarious act of desperation, he tried to justify that saying “Yes, but nobody watches those interviews”
He was then forced to admit that he was not only aware that David Cameron, George Osborne and almost all other senior leaders of the Remain camp had also explicitly stated publicly that a vote to Leave would entail leaving the SM & CU but that he had – wait for it – ….. even done so HIMSELF.
Sir Nick enjoys exceedingly generous EU pensions from being an MEP and from his time with the EU Commission. Though I’m quite sure that, even before his Meta-enrichment, money would never impact his thinking on the matter. Nick is a man of principle, he’s the most principled man money can buy.
During the 2016 debates leading up to the referendum he lambasted the Leave campaign for scaremongering about an EU Army and an EU foreign minister, calling it a ‘dangerous fantasy’, (yet both are now known to be factual) so Sir Nick, now considered to speak fluent-European, was either being ignorant or dishonest – neither option inspiring much trust.
So what is the future that Meta-Clegg envisages for us digital-plebs?
Looking at the outrageous liberal bias that infests the online world, we now inhabit a curated reality. If you are an uncritical reader, limit yourself to only a handful of news sources or accept what the internet gives you without a healthy dose of scepticism, then your impression of the world is mediated by organisations that will only bring you information that sits within a certain narrative framework, or they’ll “interpret” it in such a way that you end up with a (cynically and deliberately) skewed version of the truth. It’s as though we’ve combined Wokeipedia, HAL 9000 and Skynet and just crossed our fingers about how it will shape our understanding of the world.
We’ve taken Social Media, Search Engines and AI, programmed it with search parameters all slanted to match current-orthodoxy, then pointed it at an imperfect world and told it that humans are fallible but that it is not.
We’re soon going to grant it access to all our critical system architecture and infrastructure, and the only things holding it in check will be security measures put in place by luminaries like Nick Clegg, Kamala Harris and the heads of DEI from a consortium of multinational corporations.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
I give us 6 months.
Brilliant…
I think his superpower is the illusion of sincerity. –> There is an old quote from the American comedian George Burns that says once you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.
His super-power is losing a TV debate against Nigel Farage. Not once, but twice. So presumably an inability to learn from his mistakes too. Throw in poor judgement.
He’s nothing more than a mercenary. Posing as a liberal humanitarian.
The takeaway from this piece, as with so many others, is that the British state is weak and divided and easily subjected to the whims of foreign companies. Britain has, in essence, become a protectorate.
A nice exposé
… undone, as always, by the author’s blindered refusal to at least engage in the thought experiment of how a panopticon
-the state’s industrial-strength AI-enabled monitoring, tracking & acting upon 3 Billion people’s UN-encrypted messages-
would be a net social improvement for the world and Britain in the years and decades ahead.
“The children” would have to live in that world too. All of them.
One would expect the author to argue for a wiretap on every phone call and a police camera in every home “to protect the children”
… until we discover a camera is needed in every room of the home – and multiple ones at that, if the children are to be completely safe.
Also, an obvious answer to questions never asked about why Meta outpaces all other platforms in NCMEC complaints of online abuse:
Aside from the clear truth that Meta and teeny-tiny X are the only true social networks of the companies listed
-as opposed to video or content-hosting platforms-
most other companies don’t care to, and can’t be enforced to, report the scale of abuse on their platform.
Yes, this includes the US Defence Department-aligned Google, and even Beijing’s TikTok, which must be a shock.
Snake like….
?
I dont really like this article. It reads like a Sunday Times piece. Nick Clegg is not the story here. He is just a bland political appointee to a corporate role.
But a more serious failibg is the blind, tacit assumption that we are not entitled to privacy and that the government and Meta should be allowed to access our messages. With cbdc’s coming down the tracts, carbon credits nevermind the ” misinformation” police, I think privacy online is incredibly important.
Clegg flies around on a private jet and has a nice house in london. Big deal
Excellent comment. The Clegg personal profile seems out of step with the thrust of the essay.
….
An erudite comment.
Hasn’t discovered the delete in the menu yet.
The most extraordinary thing about this rather long article is how much Nick Clegg is paid. A rather ordinary individual albeit a nice enough chap can command such a massive salary. The tech world he inhabits is so totally divorced from ordinary experiences and realities of the people he once represented. I wonder how he justifies it to himself?
There are people in the tech world who actually earn the big money. And others who just get paid it. You’re right – Nick Clegg is in the second group. He has created nothing. Ever.
Zuckerman spent more than $450 million to throw the election Joe’s way last time. You buy a lot of gratitude that way.
Oh, did he do that? I never really cared for the guy much, but if what you say is true, I am a lot more kindly disposed towards him.
I always had my suspicions about him ….too glib too Westminster School “clever clogs” and with lots of wealth behind him he nevertheless projected himself as the “people’s choice”. The truth is that people from that particular “European Patrician Bureaucratic” background are the ones that have undermined democracy the most. Now he is “following the money” and working for an organisation that is further undermining the foundations of our Western Democratic/ Free society. Meta is an organisation that is not “regulated” and publishes things that would result in prosecution if published by a regulated media organisation. Australia has “called them out” and it will be interesting to see who wins that particular battle …..but I am not placing a bet at this stage.