An 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.
Stephen Walsh
2 months ago
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Jim Veenbaas
2 months ago
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.
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.
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!
Martin M
2 months ago
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.
No, I mean provide leadership, style, panache, grit….
Simon Boudewijn
2 months ago
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?
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.
Andrew Horsman
2 months ago
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.
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.
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!
This may be indelicate but, are you by any chance a nonce?
Mike Bell
2 months ago
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.
Ash Ley
2 months ago
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.
Citizen Diversity
2 months ago
Not the size of a country. More the size of an supranational religious institution. The equivalent of the monastic institutions of the medieval era.
Brian Doyle
2 months ago
Real power is never given
It can only be seized
Paddy Taylor
2 months ago
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.
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.
R Wright
2 months ago
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.
Christopher Boyle
2 months ago
A nice exposé
… undone, as always, by the author’s blindered refusal to at least engage in the thought experiment of how a panopticon
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.
Terry Davies
2 months ago
Snake like….
Allan Kerr
2 months ago
?
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago
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
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.
Jerry Carroll
2 months ago
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.
Peter Carne
2 months ago
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.
An 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.