Nick Clegg has strongly defended Meta’s decision to reduce moderation and get rid of fact-checkers on its social media platforms.
The changes to Facebook, Instagram and Threads, including moves to promote more political content, were announced by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month.
As he prepares to leave the tech company after six years to make way for Donald Trump-friendly Joel Kaplan, Clegg denies that Metta is lessening his commitment to the 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 remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on insisting that the new policy was “desirable and appropriate”.
The former UK deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader added: “We still have 40,000 people working on security and content moderation. We’re still spending $5bn (£4bn) on platform integrity this year. We have the most sophisticated community standards in the industry yet.
Clegg said Meta’s fact-checkers will be replaced by a new community notice-type system, similar to that used by Elon Musk’s rival social media site X, to be rolled out initially 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 claimed public trust. is over.
He said Zuckerberg, who has allied himself closely with Trump in recent weeks, simply wants to “rightsize” Meta’s approach to content moderation.
At a roundtable with reporters at a Swiss ski resort, Clegg was repeatedly challenged on some of the phrases that will now be allowed on Meta’s platforms, including calling groups of people “dirty” and LGBT people “mentally”. To say “sick”.
Clegg continued to defend the approach, telling the event in Davos: “There are a lot of social, political issues where, regardless of your own views – and I have very strong views myself – immigration and gender and so on. On the kinds of issues, where it seems impossible for us to say things on the floor of Congress or in the everyday media that they can’t say on social media. So there have been some very appropriate changes.”
Targeting people in a way that was intended to bully or harass them was unacceptable, he added.
