Nick Clegg has forcefully defended Meta’s decision to reduce moderation on its social media platforms and ditch fact-checkers.
The changes to Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which also included moves to promote more political content, were announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month.
As he prepares to leave the technology company after six years to make way for Joel Kaplan, Donald Trump’s closest friend, Clegg denied that Meta was lowering his commitment to the truth.
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“I urge you to analyze the substance of what Meta announced. “Ignore the noise, the politics and the drama that surrounds it,” he said in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, insisting that the new policy was “circumscribed and tailored.”
The former UK deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader added: “We still have 40,000 people working in security and content moderation. We are still spending $5 billion (£4 billion) a year this year on platform integrity. “We still have by far the most sophisticated community standards in the industry.”
Clegg said the new community notes-type system replacing Meta’s fact-checkers, similar to that used by Elon Musk’s rival social media site X, would initially be introduced in the US.
He called it a “crowdsourced or Wikipedia-style approach to disinformation,” which he said could be “more scalable” than fact-checkers, who he said had lost public trust.
He said Zuckerberg, who has aligned himself closely with Trump in recent weeks, simply wanted to “adapt” Meta’s approach to content moderation.
At a roundtable with journalists at the Swiss ski resort, Clegg was repeatedly questioned about some of the phrases that will now be allowed on Meta platforms, including calling groups of people “filth” and referring to LGBT people as “mentally sick.”
Clegg continued to defend this approach, saying at the Davos event: “There are a number of social and political issues where, regardless of your own views – and I have very strong views myself – on issues related to immigration and gender, etc., It simply seems unfeasible to us that people can say things in the Chamber of Congress, or in the everyday media, that they cannot say on social networks. So there have been some very personalized changes.”
He added that speech directed at people with the intention of intimidating or harassing them remained unacceptable.