Nick Clegg, the onetime deputy prime minister of the UK turned Big Tech executive, has announced his resignation from Meta after six years in Silicon Valley.
Clegg joined the Facebook parent company in 2018 after over a decade of politics that saw him work as a member of the European Parliament, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, the leader of the Liberal Democrats and, for five years as deputy prime minister during the premiership of David Cameron.
The former Lib Dem leader was initially hired as vice president of global affairs before rising to president of global affairs at Meta – one of the top jobs at the tech firm – in 2022.
At Meta, Clegg has been tasked with helping steer the company’s interactions with policymakers and guide it through the increasingly political elements of Big Tech.
As Clegg put it: “My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between “big tech” and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector.”
As a new year begins, I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on from my role as President, Global Affairs at Meta. It truly has been an adventure of a lifetime! I am proud of the work I have been able to do leading and supporting teams across the… pic.twitter.com/pXEP4TZYVe
— Nick Clegg (@nickclegg) January 2, 2025
Indeed, the six years Clegg spent as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s top staff saw scandal, a brief and intense interest in whatever the metaverse is, a pivot to AI and an almost quadrupled share price.
Cambridge Analytica
Something of a baptism by fire for Clegg, 2018 was a controversial time to join Meta, then called Facebook, which was under massive scrutiny for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that saw it complicit in the non-consensual harvesting of millions of users’ personal data in support of the 2016 Republican campaign for the US presidency.
At the time of his joining Clegg said he was “convinced the culture is changing” at Facebook, requiring “lawmakers need to have a serious conversation about whether data-intensive companies allow other companies to share and use data”.
For its role in the scandal, Facebook was fined more than $5bn by regulators in the US and the UK and its reputation among the public was left in tatters.
The Facebook Oversight Board
Just as confidence in Facebook’s ethical practices was tumbling, Clegg was tasked with helping to establish the company’s oversight board. The idea was to improve fairness, transparency and accountability.
The board began operations in 2020, with early rulings focused on content moderation that would ultimately build out the precedent for the censorship policies affecting the company’s social media platforms.
Zuckerberg had approved the creation of the board before Clegg’s arrival, however, said it was “stalled within the company until Nick really took it on”.
Making the Metaverse
A few months after Zuckerberg declared the dawn of the metaverse in October 2021, Clegg penned a roughly 8,000-word manifesto on what this would mean and why people should care.
Among other things, Clegg declared the metaverse – 3D virtual spaces for people to interact – presented massive opportunities for education, health and economics and that it would bring lots of new jobs for developers.
He also warned that there were genuine risks of hardware-based divides and fragmented experiences caused by a lack of interoperability between developers.
The piece noted that it would take up to 15 years for the vision of the metaverse to be realised if not longer. There are no guarantees as to whether the metaverse may one day go somewhere, however, just over three years after its announcement public interest has cratered.
OpenAI vs open AI
Towards the end of Clegg’s time at Meta the company, along with the rest of the tech industry, set its sights on capitalising on the rise of generative AI technology.
Though it has produced a chatbot that an average user may find indistinguishable from a tool like ChatGPT, the company and its president of global affairs were keen to champion the idea that its AI was open, transparent and free.
Speaking at a Meta event in London in April 2024, Clegg warned against new technologies being “kept in the clammy hands of a small number of very, very large and well-heeled companies in California”.
Clegg said: “Can anyone conceive of a world in which AI technology…which is going to be the means by which we communicate with each other in the online world for generations to come, should only be determined and shaped by a small number of companies who’ve got the GPU capacity, the deep pockets, the data to build the underlying technology?”
In part, Clegg’s comments were directed at OpenAI, the practices of which Meta has been keen to distance itself from, despite technological similarities.
Struggles in Europe
Nick Clegg has historically presented himself as a true European, however, the descendent of German nobles and imperial Russian statesmen clashed with the European Union over its controversial AI legislation.
The EU AI Act brought tension between the union and tech firms, with Clegg’s boss reportedly telling Meta staff not to push new artificial intelligence services in the EU.
In October, Meta expanded its latest generative AI tool to a handful of countries outside of the US, including Brazil and the UK.
When announcing the expansion, Clegg wrote that the company “still can’t roll it out in the EU because of the regulatory uncertainty we face there”.
He added: “I hope the new Commission looks afresh at these issues, consistent with President Von Der Leyen’s aim of completing the EU’s digital Single Market, so Europeans can benefit from this new wave of technologies.”
Though as a politician Clegg was staunchly in support of the UK remaining part of the EU, Brexit ironically allowed Meta to continue pushing its AI services in Britain.
The post Key moments of Nick Clegg’s tenure at Meta as he steps down appeared first on UKTN.
