STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Our next guest has had a career like few others. Nick Clegg was deputy prime minister of the U.K. and then became president of global affairs at Meta, a close aide to company founder Mark Zuckerberg. He's now written of his experience in a book called "How To Save The Internet." Clegg left Meta at the start of this year, just as Zuckerberg and other tech leaders were heading to President Trump's second inauguration.
NICK CLEGG: Many of them, of course, lined up in front of the members of the cabinet. So it was as if the tech leadership of Silicon Valley was being given greater priority than the political leadership of the new administration.
INSKEEP: At almost the same time, Meta decided to abandon fact-checking on social media posts, aligning with an administration that disliked it. Clegg says he understands the tech world's sudden shift to Trump after years when they seemed to favor Democrats or despised politics altogether.
CLEGG: And I guess that's partly driven by the fact that a lot of these big companies are in a bit of an existential competition with each other on AI. So of course, in that context, if you see your neighbor or the leader of your, you know, most competitive opponent in Silicon Valley beating a path to Mar-a-Lago or Washington, D.C., you think, oh, well, I better do the same thing as well. I don't want to be left out. So I think there was a kind of FOMO thing going on where if one or two of them were doing that, they all ended up doing that.
INSKEEP: Is that why Meta shifted its stance on content moderation at that very moment?
CLEGG: Well, I think it may have played a part of it. I think, to be fair, there is a perception, which I don't think is wholly wrong, for what it's worth, that maybe the companies, including Meta, and at - even at my time at Meta - that maybe we overdid it a bit and we needed to pull back on some of that. And I don't think you can criticize the companies or criticize Meta for adjusting because, you know, it's not a science, and the boundaries of free expression versus content moderation have become a much more politicized subject in the last half-decade or so. But I would have thought in the long run, it is in all of their interests not to embark on this kind of whiplash, you know, where they keep changing their stance depending on who's in the White House. In the long run, given the significance of these companies, I would have thought it's best for them to be able to kind of have a bit of a north star themselves and stick to it, or stick roughly to it, rather than swinging, you know, like a yo-yo from one side to the other.
INSKEEP: I'm thinking back to 2021, when Facebook and other social media platforms banned President Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 attacks. And I can remember thinking at the time, as a journalist trying to understand this, OK, I get it. I understand why they did that, but wow. Do I really want a corporation to have that much power?
CLEGG: Right.
INSKEEP: I mean, I could feel the dilemma then.
CLEGG: Right.
INSKEEP: Looking back at it now, was Meta wrong to ban the president at that time?
CLEGG: So I was very involved. In fact, I was instrumental and key in making that decision on behalf of, as it was then, Facebook. You get an uneasy feeling having an unelected entity, one of these tech companies, deciding that an outgoing president of the United States had forfeited the right to use Facebook's services. On the other hand, it is equally troubling to think that just because someone is powerful, they can violate the rules, because all of these companies, including Meta, have quite well-established and well-publicized content rules about what you can and can't do on the platform. But I think many people felt at the time the circumstances were quite, quite exceptional, the - all the turbulence and unrest, and that was a principle which the company acted on at the time.
INSKEEP: So would you say you stand by that decision even today, even though the company ultimately backed off and paid the president for it?
CLEGG: I believe in the circumstances at the time, it was a decision that I took and others took in the company for understandable reasons because content rules of Meta were violated. But I definitely feel very uneasy about the precedent that a decision like that set, for sure.
INSKEEP: You talk about democratic countries working together to regulate the internet. You call it a digital democracies alliance. What exactly is it that you want them to regulate that is possible to regulate?
CLEGG: At the moment, we're seeing the growing fragmentation, the balkanization of the internet itself. And it's now, I think, colliding with the deglobalization of politics everywhere. Whether it's Modi, whether it's Erdogan, whether it's Trump, whether it's Brexit, they're all - governments everywhere are trying to reassert their own political sovereignty over things which otherwise escape their jurisdiction, notably the internet. And that will increasingly lead to a fragmented internet.
So my assertion in the book is that if we want to preserve the openness of the internet that we all take for granted, at least outside China, there has to be a deliberate decision by the three major techno democracies in the world - the United States, India and Europe, in that sort of descending order of importance - to create new rules of the road, new guardrails, particularly pertinent to artificial intelligence, so that the openness - so open data flows, for instance, which are the main sort of arteries of the internet, remain open in the years ahead so that there is transparency in the way in which these AI models are assembled, so that science is shared across the democratic world on how you invest in AI infrastructure and make it as sustainable as possible.
INSKEEP: I'm fascinated. Just now, if I understood you correctly, you ranked India as more important than the entirety of Europe when it comes to internet issues.
CLEGG: I do, actually. I think that if India were to swing in a Chinese direction, if I can put it crudely like that...
INSKEEP: I understand.
CLEGG: In other words, if Modi or whoever succeeds him were to decide - do you know what? India is easily big enough. It's the biggest democracy in the world. We can do what the Chinese have done, which is basically wall off the internet and surveil people within the country - I think if that were the case, then the global internet as we know it would basically be dead. So it's one of the reasons why I think the mishandling of Modi by this Trump administration seems so spectacularly misjudged because driving Modi into the embrace of his erstwhile opponent, Xi Jinping - if I was in the State Department now, that would send a real chill down my spine, I tell you, because if India aligns with China in the AI age, then U.S. leadership will over time erode.
INSKEEP: This is a mischievous way to put the question, but I'll do it. Are you then an internet globalist?
CLEGG: Yes, I am. Unapologetically so.
INSKEEP: Nick Clegg is the author of "How To Save The Internet." Thanks so much for your time.
CLEGG: Thank you.
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