Nick Clegg has given a robust defence of Meta’s decision to downgrade moderation on its social media platforms and get rid of factcheckers.
The changes on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which also included moves to promote more political content, were announced by the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, earlier this month.
As he prepares to depart the tech company after six years to make way for the more Donald Trump-friendly Joel Kaplan, Clegg denied that Meta was downgrading its commitment to truth.
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“I would urge you to look at the substance of what Meta announced. Ignore the noise and the politics and the drama around it,” he said in comments to the World Economic Forum in Davos, insisting 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 on safety and content moderation. We’re still spending $5bn (£4bn) a year this year on integrity on the platform. We still have by far the industry’s most sophisticated community standards.”
Clegg said the new community notes-type system replacing Meta’s factcheckers, similar to the one 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 misinformation”, which he said could be “more scalable” than factcheckers, who he claimed had lost the trust of the public.
He said Zuckerberg, who has allied himself closely with Trump in recent weeks, simply wanted to “rightsize” Meta’s approach to content moderation.
At a roundtable with journalists in the Swiss ski resort, Clegg was challenged repeatedly on some of the phrases that will now be permitted on Meta’s platforms, including calling groups of people “filth” and referring to LGBT people as “mentally ill”.
Clegg continued to defend the approach, telling the event in Davos: “There are a number of societal, political issues where, regardless of your own views – and I have very strong views myself – on issues around immigration and gender and so on, where it just seems unfeasible for us for people to be able to say things on the floor of the House of Congress, or in everyday media, that they can’t say on social media. So there have been some very tailored changes.”
He added that speech targeted at people in a way intended to bully or harass them remained unacceptable.
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