Former Meta President & Deputy PM, Nick Clegg: Is Social Media Driving Us Apart?

0:00It's as if conflict and hatred and strife were invented by the reshare button. I mean, it's just like patently not true. We've had civil war, world wars, revolutions and conflict, unfortunately, from the dawn of time. Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin.

0:20Nick Clegg:We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies. At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with Giant Ideas that are changing the world. This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them. We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it. Today on the podcast, we're joined by Nick Clegg, the former UK Deputy Prime Minister and the former President at Meta. He's had a front-row seat to two of the biggest power structures globally, Westminster and Silicon Valley.

0:54Nick Clegg:Today, we're going to talk about his new book, How to Save the Internet. and whether in fact it's the internet that needs saving or us from the internet. We're going to talk about whether social media has been a profoundly disturbing influence on the world or something more positive. We'll talk about how to regulate AI, whether it can be a force for good or bad, and what Nick sees as the big challenges to fix the relationship between government, big tech, and society. Nick, welcome to Giant Ideas. It's very good to be here. Thanks for coming. Before we get into the kind of big discussion topics about society and tech and big business, I want to ask you personally about technology and the impact on your life.

1:32Nick Clegg:So I say this as someone whose whole career was built on tech. I did a photo app, which was not possible without the advent of the iPhone and social media. That was my big break. So I benefited from it massively. But if I just look at my own kind of home life, am I happier with a phone that I'm always on and social media? probably I'd be a better dad, maybe a better husband if I wasn't always on my phone and if I had more hobbies that I could just get on with. And so on a personal level, sometimes I do wonder, even as someone who's benefited so much from this and whose day job is to go back to technology founders, is it actually good for our happiness?

2:08Nick Clegg:I'm just curious, your very personal reflections on that. I think happiness is a super difficult benchmark. um um i wouldn't say it's a cut and dry um judgment on if that's the basis i mean god happiness shmappiness how on earth how to earth do you define that but no no i listen i i'm i suspect i'm i suspect we're very similar um um i mean i've worked in tech for for many years now but i'm not i wouldn't say i'm a sort of massive sort of tech sort of geek um i wouldn't call myself as a massive early adopter pretty conventional use of AI at the moment very intense use like lots of people of messaging apps spend far too much time reading the news online don't actually use social media apps that much but to your point and I'm not sure this categorizes as happiness but there's certainly things that I know bring me happiness that I sort of accidentally forego and I definitely think spending too much time on the phone is but so reading is a classic example I I've always been a pretty voracious reader particularly fiction and I remember in my sort of the sort of crazy years when I was in very very high pressure environment in politics and government I would find reading just even a few pages of a novel in the evening was just such a tonic it was like and i i i just too often now find myself uh looking at my screen instead and then dozing off and they're not really so i think the whole you know the phone in the phone next to the bed i think is my sort of biting so okay i'm now resolved as of this moment as of this evening i'm gonna i'm gonna put the phone somewhere else but you know definitely definitely it's it's those it's the displacement it's the displacement issue and i think yeah you need to be disciplined and And of course, it's always, you've got kids.

4:02Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, my kids are now, well, they're two adults, one's a teen. But, you know, it's always difficult to push you pull me with the kids to get off your phone. And you don't want to make it a flashpoint because that's negative. No, it's not straightforward. It's not straightforward at all.

4:17Nick Clegg:And for your kids, have you found the classic thing of needing to try and drag them away from screens, whether it's phones or computer games? It's not been not too bad, actually. Partly, I've got three boys who just basically football obsessed. So, okay. Okay, I mean, how many times can you watch a messy goal on YouTube? And is it really harmful if you watch it 100 times rather than 99 times? I don't know. You know what I mean? Right. I may be completely deluded. Maybe they're doing all sorts of nefarious things online. But I get the impression they've always been, they've always had pretty plain vanilla online taste.

4:50But do I sort of feel as a dad, can you just get off your phone, mate? Yeah. I mean, who doesn't? Absolutely.

4:56Nick Clegg:We had Alain de Botton on the show, and he came up with this very pithy one-liner, which was that the secret to a modern marriage is to be more interesting than your partner's smartphone, which I found depressingly true. That's a very, but unfortunately, there might be quite a high bar sometimes, yeah. So maybe we've been broadening it out beyond our kind of personal lives, just to the impacts of technology on society. I want to talk to you about your book and the fractured internet and AI, but maybe just start with social media. Obviously, you have this huge role at Meta. I sort of, every time I hear you speak and write, I basically find myself agreeing kind of with your point of view.

5:30Nick Clegg:I think it was similar to our views. But the one area I kind of disagree with is social media. And again, I say that as someone who built a social media app, sold it to Microsoft. But to me, and I think you have a contrarian view because I think most people, even in tech, and maybe particularly in tech, would say social media has, you know, had negative impacts on mental health, teenagers, has driven polarization. You, as I understand, have quite a different view, which is that that's not necessarily causation. Yeah. Yeah. And for anyone who really wants to get into this, sorry to sound like a walking publicist for my own book, but I do try and go over this in very considerable detail in the book.

6:07And in quite painstaking detail, because I kind of, no one's going to believe my subjective view. They're going to say, oh, you're just a paid shill for a big tech company and so on. So I do try and marshal the evidence, the academic empirical evidence. and I think even if you are a sort of rabid sort of anti-big tech anti-social media person if you're exposed to the evidence yeah um it is just generally at its most mile much much more mixed than a lot of the kind of I think increasingly caricatured assertions about the link between social media consumption and human behavior or actually evidence confounds it completely um um but it slightly depends on what sort of harm you're looking at i think on on kids for instance it is self-evidently the case i think that you know social media use can be very negative for some kids and so on it's just much much harder to prove that that is a societal level phenomenon phenomenon clearly for particularly individuals and there is some evidence again empirical evidence that it passive scrolling particularly not exclusively by teen girls is really not great at all.

7:17But on polarization, oddly there, I think the evidence is more unambiguously against the stereotypical assertion. If you look at some of the big studies that have been done in Stanford, they did a huge longitudinal study looking at, I think it was, what was it, nine countries over 40 years about and they measure what's called effective polarizations how you sort of view and treat someone who you know with whom you don't agree and so on um they really it just you really do have to search almost in vain for a causal link most effective polarization which has been measurable in the united states erupted before social media even um became a thing um effective polarization is often highest amongst segments of the population the old those without a college education as the americans put it um who don't use social media and there's also an interesting technical reason why the sources of political polarization at least seem to be more associated with technologies like um like cable news or a highly partisan tabloid newspaper than social media or rather so i'll be specific here or rather social media of old i think social media is very, very fast from a kind of human thing into more of a sort of pipeline of algorithmically recommended, often synthetically generated content.

8:43And the reason is this, is for anyone who's listening to this who uses Facebook, you will know that when people say you have friends on Facebook, they're often actually not really friends. They're that annoying person who you worked next to in the office 10 years ago and kept on with on social media. It's your ex-girlfriend, it's your ex-boyfriend. It's the mum of your daughter's football. to it's what the sociologists call weak so it's your mad uncle it's weak sociological links and because who you are friends with is the principal signal by which the ranking algorithm chooses what you see before you see anything else it follows that actually in terms of ideological political content you're actually seeing what is being prioritized by the system is the is the political views your mad uncle or that person you haven't seen in 10 years it's actually very mixed much more mixed than if you read the Daily Mail every day or only watch Fox News.

9:37Right. So the Berkman Klein Institute, for instance, at Harvard University, have done some really interesting work. I think it was around the 2020 election, maybe it was before. And they found this flywheel of Trump on Twitter and cable news being the thing that really, really created these sort of bubble effects. So I don't think on polarization it is as good. And also, the only other thing I would say is I've always been a bit struck by the willingness of people to make what are in effect sort of techno-determinist assertions which are completely ahistorical. It's as if conflict and hatred and strife were invented by the reshare button.

10:18I mean it's just like patently not true. We've had civil war, world wars, revolutions and conflict unfortunately from the dawn of time. um and so i i just always i always find it so odd when people sort of say oh nasty things have happened because i'm spending all my time no i'm afraid awful things have happened throughout our whole history so i found both empirically and with the with the through the lens of history i particularly think the assertions around the effect of social media on on kind of animosity if I can social ideological animosity I it for me it's never really stacked up doesn't mean a whole bunch of other collateral effects absolutely doesn't mean that these companies haven't made some egregious mistakes doesn't mean that there aren't very negative things which can happen um by people who are using social media and of course ghastly content I don't absolutely I don't want to sort of flip the other way sure but and the reason I feel so strongly about this is um as an ex-politician and lawmaker, I mean, you just get very bad policy when it's driven by basically newspaper headlines.

11:26You remember, a lot of this debate is driven in part by vested interests in the publishing industry. As with AI. Yes, who quite understandably loathe and fear these companies because they've messed up their advertising model and they worry that they're attracting eyeballs and people aren't buying their papers. So you've got a very, very, you've got a sort of gatekeeping vested interest that is the prism through which so much of this debate happens and in the world i previously occupied in politics that's particularly pronounced because politicians of course worked out that the easiest way to get favorable coverage on page two or three of the telegraph of the time or whatever is to just say i've issued a press release saying i'm going to you know clip silicon valley's wings and goes ah right and so i guess i just i i just it's it's not that i'm i don't have any monopoly of wisdom i just do think on some of these issues we have we have we've sort of slightly wallowed in assertion rather than evidence and on occasion sort of a sort of techno moral panic or moral panic about technology which again as i explain in the book is not new i mean you you see this repeatedly whether it's the bicycle the car, the internet, the phone, the television.

12:37I'm almost 59. I remember vividly when I was young, when ads started on terrestrial television, I had kids in the class whose parents would send them out of the room because they thought the ads for crispy pancakes or something would sort of get into their neural pathways and use exactly the same language as they now do about online. My mum wouldn't allow me and my brothers and my sister to watch. I think it was, we used to, oh God, we used to have endless. We were so annoyed. She had this thing that we were not allowed to watch more than 30 minutes television. Somehow 30 minutes was a sort of.

13:11Nick Clegg:You'd go crazy after that. Otherwise, I know something really loopy was going to happen. We had the same with computer games. They were sort of seen as really genuinely very bad for your soul. No, no. But do you remember in the 80s, like screaming headlines? If you use this computer game, little Jimmy, your otherwise beatifically angelic little son will become an axe murderer. I mean, it's absurd. No, I'm with you. And I think also on the incumbents, I think is a really big problem, actually. I think I was talking to someone in the UK government fairly high up and saying, why are you not doing more to make the UK very friendly to AI?

13:44Nick Clegg:And they said, look, we'd love to do more. But all of the incumbent media companies who are so afraid of their business models being destroyed by AI are so aggressive against it. But look what happened. Was it two years ago? I mean, I was, I'm not sure if you were there, but I was one of the hordes of people who were in the pouring rain outside Milton Keynes in these marquees when the government convened this Bletchley Park Safety Summit. And honestly, I think Oliver Down and Rishi Sunat, I think they meant well. But when you actually ask yourself, why have you assembled the whole world to talk about an existential risk that is either remote or certainly perhaps unlikely and certainly not imminent?

14:24Well, it's because every single newspaper had screaming headlines of robots with flaming red eyes saying they're going to eliminate humanity by next Tuesday. Okay. So I guess it's maybe the old fashioned, certainly unfashionable, I accept that. But to say, look, come on, we just got to be more disciplined and look at the evidence and not just get, because it's so emotive. Sure.

14:46Nick Clegg:Well, let's talk about the evidence. I mean, you know, it's easy to throw studies around. I did look at some quite interesting studies. I think it was actually TikTok and X, recent studies, which, and it was very simple. They would assign people up to the platforms. And then regardless almost of which political affiliation they said they identified with, I think there was one study in Germany, they were all of them consistently bombarded with far right German political content. That was on TikTok, I think. X obviously under Musk is a very different company to what it was before. I wonder if your views on this have changed now that we have Musk running X, who quite clearly to me at least is deliberately fermenting polarisation.

15:25Sorry, absolutely. I should be super clear. I'm not speaking, I don't actually use X. I don't use TikTok. I didn't work for those companies. I totally accept that when I start speaking sweepingly about social media, I'm actually talking about the social media that I know a lot more about. And I'd say, and so absolutely, I think, I mean, X, as far as I can make it, it's just become a total sort of cesspit. The thing I would say is twofold. Firstly, I don't want to understate the significance of the TikTokification of all social media. And it's very, very, this is a very profound thing. When I went to Silicon Valley in autumn of 2018, one of the reasons I went was I was, again, rather unfashionably because it was not exactly a reputationally obvious thing to do.

16:19But I genuinely retain this view that the kind of platform function where these social media apps served in effect as a platform for human beings, and because it's an ad-based model for free, to express themselves without hindrance, to communicate with family and friends and so on and so forth. I thought that I loved this idea that was a technology. Sure, it has flaws and so on. But it was an extraordinarily enabling technology. And as a sort of old-fashioned liberal, this idea that it empowers you to, you know, on a scale, which is, you know, quite unprecedented. But it was about human content.

17:00It was about enabling humans to generate content, you know, communicate with each other and so on. That is now like a dim and distant memory. Now, I don't know what the latest. I think when I left the company, I think 50 % or maybe more of content on Instagram, I may be misremembering the statistic. It was nothing to do with your friends or family. It was completely unconnected from your social life. It was just stuff that was sort of fired at you by a recommendation engine, content that was plucked from the furthest recesses of the internet. And, of course, increasingly content that is also synthetic.

17:39And it's not, you know, so I think oddly enough, the social media that I often have in my head is social, whereas increasingly TikTok, YouTube, Instagram in particular, they're all basically becoming pipelines for recommended short form video entertainment content. That's quite different. That's the first thing. Having said that, in the old world, because I was so curious exactly in the point you made, I helped – it was a bit of a tricky thing to get through. were finally persuaded the lawyers and others to construct with, I think it was 11 universities across the United States, by far the largest and academically entirely rigorous study of the interaction of social media and voting behavior and political behavior during the 2020 US presidential election.

18:37And I actually don't think anything's been repeated on that scale since. And you had huge control groups. I mean, you had like 250 people who would volunteer to use Facebook through the 2020 presidential election with no algorithmic ranking at all. So just a chronological feed. Another 250 ,000 who wouldn't use Facebook at all. Another quarter million who had no capacity to reshare, so no virality. And I think the academics haven't yet published all the papers, but they've published the bulk of them in peer-reviewed papers and so on. um magazines and publications but i don't think it's and i'm sure i'm simplifying it a little but in effect it showed how little effect there appeared to be between your consumption of social media and some of your political attitudes doesn't mean none and the rest of it i just again and again that may have changed now because social media has changed so much it's become less social but i just i kind of think i kind of think we and of course remember politics politics and ideology and news, I mean, I think it constitutes, or at least when I last looked, it constituted like 3%.

19:44It is low, isn't it?

19:45Nick Clegg:I think it's sub 5%. It's low, but a low number out of squillions is still, you know. If you set aside impact for a minute and just sort of put that to one side, what about intention? So when I was hiring people coming out of Apple and Twitter and Instagram back in the day, pre them being acquired by Meta, the people working on social were saying to me, you know, it was known within those companies that divisive stuff, stuff that made people angry, did make them engage more, spend more time. And that was kind of encouraged. Did you have to stamp any of that culture out when you were at Meta? So it's complicated, as they say, because of course, any company, why do you have blaring headlines which instill rage or guilt or fear or envy on every newspaper?

20:32because it elicits a visceral reaction. I mean, it's hardly rocket science to assert that an emotional reaction is more engaging to us, sort of anthropologically and psychologically. So sure, stuff online, much like stuff in print, if it has an emotive impact, it's going to engage you more. I think what has happened, certainly in the times I was in the company, I think the rules which drew a line between emotive content and sort of willfully harmful content, inciting. I mean, I think there were 21 categories of content that I sort of presided over. They were called the community standards from IP fraud to hate speech to incitement to violence and so on and so forth.

21:15I think that became increasingly well policed. And also what I think I also discovered is if you overdo it, or maybe X is proving otherwise, but this idea that you if you just give people bilge I mean nasty bilge that it's a sensible for your business model is not correct it really isn't a because actually after a while people just go oh screw it I just don't like this stuff um and secondly and very importantly because the people who pay your lunch don't like it if you're if you're an ad business right commercial incentive is actually oddly enough to do the reverse of what's often alleged which is I think one of the flaws of the whole professor zuboff surveillance capitalism paradigm is no if you're if you're selling soap powder or or cars or plastic ducks you delight you want your you want your ad next to sort of plain vanilla disney type content aspirational stuff so the commercial incentive is always slightly pointed in a different way now that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that that that that human reflex that you refer to which is that we just we just are just our eyeballs go to stuff that elicits yeah that of course that's but that's the case in life now it is at a it is at a level of velocity it is amplified like everything it's accelerated it's personalized a far greater degree in the social media age i don't think there's any tweak there's no algorithmic tweak that can stop the human tendency to respond to emotive content i think there's a lot that can and has been done some of it's been altered recently as the mood swing has changed dramatically in the US.

22:49But yeah, so I think a better balance was struck over time.

22:53Nick Clegg:Okay. Let's talk about that mood swing. From the outside looking in, it seemed like with Sheryl Sandberg and yourself, Mark Zuckerberg had people who were sort of moderating influences there. Ultimately, it seemed from the outside to make technology a force for good, to try and confront head on a lot of the issues we've been talking about. Very noticeably, you know, after you left, almost immediately after you left Meta, Zuckerberg seemed to take a a completely different direction of, you know, just let it rip. Not just him, but clearly across Silicon Valley, much more of a focus on free speech, throwing away all moderation.

23:29Nick Clegg:We had someone from Andreessen Horowitz who created their American Dynamism practice, Catherine Boyle. And, you know, she said basically, you know, people on the internet tell the truth. That's really, it's not they're kind of saying one thing online, which I don't really mean, and it's really extreme. And offline, they're sort of all placid. It's like, no, that kind of, those points of view are real. They've been suppressed. And now this is what people really think. And we should let it rip. What's your take, not just on Meta, but maybe broaden it out on the industry about that flip to a very different model?

23:59So I think it's pretty difficult to understand all of that without dwelling on the magnitude of what happened in basically 2020 in the US. And 2020 is like the crucible of a lot of the changes. You had this extraordinary coincidence of the pandemic lockdown, which was way more contested in the US than it was here. I hear I get the impression, I was living over there at the time, if you say to the Brits, hey, we're going to pay you to stay home and drink tepid tea and watch daytime television, it was fine.

24:34Nick Clegg:It was fascinating. People really almost wanted to be told what to do. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is actually genuinely very interesting. Must have concerned you as a liberal. Well, it has actually. And I also think economically, and if you look at the terrible problems we've now got here as a country, this is a slight sort of departure, but I think it is interesting. I can see why the government, the UK government at the time did this furlough scheme. Yeah. But actually, with hindsight, it was probably a big error because what they did in the US is they basically threw money at people. OK. The furlough scheme threw money at jobs and it fostered this totally false illusion that you could just pick up your job where you left it at the end of the pandemic.

25:12Whereas in the US, you've had a huge amount of actually quite creative and often socially upward labor mobility and dynamism as people have come out of. And they've said, well, it's a fresh start. Yeah. A press restart.

25:23Nick Clegg:Lots of business creation. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas here, I just think, you know, we're still limping sort of post-COVID. Anyway, but in the US, I cannot exaggerate how different it was. They're just wearing the mask immediately became a political and cultural thing. And the red states wouldn't do it. And you went to Florida and Texas, you didn't wear a mask. You're proud not to. And, you know, of course, this demonization of Fauci by the right. And then you had the George Floyd moment and all the race tensions. And you had Trump saying he was going to send in the troops. and should the social media companies have allowed that or not allowed that.

25:56In that instance, we did. And then, oh, and then there was the election. And then was the election, how could it be held during the pandemic? People like Mark Zuckerberg, actually in this case, totally innocently gave a whole bunch of his own money to help election administrators. The right immediately said, you're bending the rules to help the Democrats. Then you had this thing about Hunter Biden and his laptop. What a weird story. He leaves his laptop in a computer repair shop and it's got all this filth on it. and what, that can't be right, and then X banned it altogether, and that's born the great conspiracy theory.

26:28Facebook, we didn't remove it, but it was sort of demoted. I cannot tell you how much all of that, plus more, has just scrambled the political brain and the sort of political class in the US and certainly radicalized a number of people in Silicon Valley, And, of course, that then umbilically led to the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter, driven by this rage against the kind of excessive woke karate of the West Coast and a belief that there was a conspiracy theory. You know, I've had to give evidence in sort of congressional committees. Absolutely. You know, this assertion that big tech was somehow, you know, playing fast and loose with the truth all to benefit the left.

27:12And it just it really and the upshot of it. And it's very important for non-Americans to understand this, whether you like it or not, is that close to half the country did think by the time of the last election that Silicon Valley was was was was actively censoring their worldview. so so much though i find the whole stampede of all the tech bros to mar-a-lago and the white house pretty unedifying uh and personally i don't think it's it's my personal view it's part one of the reasons why i moved on i don't actually think it's very smart business either because what are they going to do when there's a democrat president they're going to turn around so now we agree with everything that you believe i mean you know you can't have this ridiculous whiplash every time there's a change of political mood in the country, or a political incumbent in the White House.