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Why is everyone beating around the bush?

Its Nick Clegg

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I'm confused.

What's the allegation?

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Former senior British politician Nick Clegg joined Meta in 2018 as vice president for global affairs and communication. He rose to Meta’s president for global affairs in 2022, and left in 2025 for an AI startup.

This would be shortly after Wynn-Williams’ 2017 departure from the policy role she describes in the book at hand. And it would be around the time that word was getting around about Facebook’s role in what Amnesty and the UN described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Among other things.

That story didn’t go on to a happy ending after 2017, and one imagines that, in the decade since, there have been fewer and fewer situations of strife, geopolitical gamesmanship, and civil conflict where Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp could avoid taking consequential policy decisions.

Meta were enmeshed in ample US domestic drama during that period, too; and Clegg’s replacement in the policy role was someone in the new administration’s orbit. Perhaps that’s fresh on the ancestor commenters’ minds.

Given the culture Ms. Wynn-Williams describes—and the tumult of the decade when he held the policy role—one imagines Mr. Clegg might have some stories to share should he choose to…

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Clegg later held the same position but was fired as Facebook decided that it was more politically favorable to stop employing someone in the role that was involved in content moderation (including actions against Donald Trump) and instead hire someone with connections to Donald Trump in January 2025, due to some sort of recent event at at that time.

I guess that the thread is implying his position would have given him access to newer claims, just as Wynn-Williams' had, and the method of his firing might give him motivation to reveal anything he knows.

Personally I feel that might be giving Clegg to much credit.

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> Clegg later held the same position

Clegg was more senior than wynn-williams. Kaplan reported to Clegg

I don't think Clegg will do something like that, because its not really in his way of doing things. He is extraordinarily well connected, and is currently riding the board of directors gravy train.

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His wife registered a political party in Spain last week funnily enough, she wants to be PM of Spain!

https://euroweeklynews.com/2026/06/26/nick-cleggs-wife-regis...

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Always was. Clegg is notorious for getting the Tories into power in 2010 by promising some basic decency, then betraying those promises to prop up the regime responsible for austerity.

He's always been an operator. Moving to Meta after he left politics was an "Oh, of course."

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> then betraying those promises to prop up the regime

I mean thats one way to look at it. Another way was, the lib dems traded everything for the chance to change the voting from FPP to proportional representation, and failed.

Yes, he went back on tuition fees, and worse still wasn't able to make it a graduate tax (hence the stupid loan system)

but the gamble was that, and it was clear at the time.

unlucky for the libdems was they didn't get PR and got blamed for the tories being shites, and were wiped out accordingly.

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Hrm. Labour was vastly unpopular. The biggest power move the LibDems could do was install preferential voting (which would harm the two party system by allowing eg

  1 minor party 
  2 major party 
  3 other major party 
...preference votes), and the British public (stupidly, but that is their decision) rejected it. He couldn't eg freeze tuition fees because the LibDems were a junior partner in the coalition. The vote on preferential voting was far more significant, if the LibDems could pick one of the other, it was right to pick preferential voting.

The British public blew it, because they bizarrely chose to have less of their own voting intentions recorded.

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I think the story about the Trump decision is likely to have a politically explosive aspect to it.

Because Zuckerberg had dragged his feet about creating the board until they needed the board in order to launder a decision they knew they might need to make.

But he wasn't just the oversight board; he was president of global affairs for three-odd years.

I don't intend to give Clegg credit, particularly. I'm not a fan. I'm just saying that people like him write books and he will surely have been approached to do so.

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I read that last part in Hugh Dennis' voice
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I agree its Nick
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I am making no allegation, to be clear. I was just having a bit of fun with the way I said it.

But it's obvious that Facebook want to make writing anything about them in a book and then publicising it an absolutely miserable experience.

I would say the very obvious target of such a message is Nick Clegg, no?

He's already written one memoir of his time in politics (didn't sell that well because he didn't have all that many fans left) but as a former Deputy Prime Minister in a really unusual coalition government, I think he's likely to have enough insights he will want to put in a book again by now (since it's plausible we be heading towards a coalition government involving the Lib Dems again, and he will think there are lessons to learn).

He also co-created the Facebook/Meta Oversight Board, which reported to him, and was the organisation finally constituted, ultimately, in time to de-platform Trump, which it then did.

And then he was president of global affairs.

He then left Meta shortly before it noticeably, shamefully and transactionally pivoted towards being Trump-compatible.

This is a book everyone wants to read, right? About the nexus of politics, extremism and social media.

And it won't get written.

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It is weird that her book doesn't mention Nick Clegg once
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Maybe because he started after she left?
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I think the flip side is that Nick Clegg is probably not a great choice of person to threaten. He's already had the utterly miserable experience of going from unusually popular politician to person personally blamed for reneging on commitments in the coalition government (a route he chose for himself), he's not American and doesn't live there any more or particularly want to go back, and is politically connected enough to not struggle to put together a legal team that's happy to take on Meta, potentially without him even needing to dip into his fairly deep pockets.

And frankly getting into a shit fight with an unpopular American billionaire where he's actually the good guy would be pretty good reputation laundering for Clegg, and make a book Brits would be inclined to dismiss as self-serving nonsense sound like it had actual revelations in it. And he'd probably greatly enjoy doing a round of podcasts and TV interviews where he's not the bad guy saying sorry any more.

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