Sir Nick Clegg: Social media’s power paradox

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1:55For this interview, I met Sir Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, and more recently former president of global affairs at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, at the BBC's headquarters here in London. Sir Nick first appeared on the global stage back in 2010 when he became the UK's deputy prime minister after his Liberal Democrats party went into a coalition government with David Cameron's Conservatives. However, after a difficult five years in office as the country went through a programme of austerity following the great financial crisis, his party lost the majority of their parliamentary seats leading to Sir Nick's resignation as party leader.

2:31After leaving politics just two years later, he surprised many political observers on both sides of the Atlantic when he was hired by Facebook, now known as Meta, to head up their global affairs and communications. In 2022, Sir Nick was then promoted to become the company's president of global affairs, where he oversaw policy and government relations. Sir Nick subsequently worked closely with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg for several years, but decided to step down at the beginning of this year and now amid growing concerns over the regulation of big tech, the growth of AI and the future of the internet itself.

3:05He's drawing on his vast experience from both Westminster and Silicon Valley to offer insight into what could be ahead. What we experience online is a very great speed mutating from something that was driven by humans. It was content that humans would generate, good, bad, lovely, ugly, to content that is synthetically generated and algorithmically recommended to you. So these great platforms, which is actually one of the reasons I was always, if unfashionably, defenders of them, they were platforms for human expression. Human content, human connection will increasingly become pipelines for algorithmically recommended entertainment content.

3:49where we as humans become, if you like, more passive recipients of both synthetically generated content, which is then automatically recommended to us. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Sir Nick Clegg. And your book is called How to Save the Internet. In fact, one of the chapters is about the paradox of power associated with AI. And I think in a way that's a good place to start because the power paradox, as you describe it, is the extraordinary capacity of modern technology, smartphones and social media to disseminate and spread power, to give the Guatemalan farmer, the fishermen from Equatorial Guinea, the chance to kind of display their wares to an audience of billions.

4:32But there's also been this extraordinary concentration of power. Yeah, that's right. Can you have one without the other? That's a very interesting question. and it relates slightly to this technical but important concept of network effects. The more human beings use them, the more useful they are. It's more and more useful to you and me. We communicated with each other about WhatsApp. It's a great service for us. It's sort of used to be owned by Meta, so it must be free because of the advertising model that pays Meta's bills. But why it's really useful for us is because we're pretty sure that lots and lots of people use it.

5:07That's what these network effects do. So, you know, this idea that you can have a sort of fragmented landscape tends not to pan out like that when people, when human beings start using new communication tools at scale. And so I think there is something in those network effects that lends itself to that power paradox where you have this great empowering of us as individual citizens. As you say, it doesn't matter whether you're rich, poor, whether you're a pope or a pauper, doesn't matter where you live. It has a great democratizing effect. It empowers people in an unprecedented way to express themselves, to share views, to say what they like, regardless of what the powers that be, wherever they live, religious, tribal, political or otherwise, think.

5:50And at the same time, it aggregates this astonishing amount of power and wealth in the hands of, as it happens, a small number of men in Silicon Valley. And I think these will become household names, a very small number of captains of Chinese industry who also run these great big juggernauts, which are in size now. They really do rival the Californian juggernauts. But does the old economic liberal in you think that there is a very strong theoretical case? The practicalities are different. We'll come to this. But a strong theoretical case for doing more to try and break up these concentrations of power.

6:20I like to think that I've kept an independent enough mind that if I really felt that breaking these entities up would lead to a far greater dispersal of power and so on. I just think because of the network effect, it's quite difficult to look at the way that these apps develop and say that new market entrants are blocked. I mean, look at TikTok. It just grew explosively almost out of nowhere. You know, if Instagram or Pinterest or X were that good, there wouldn't have been any space for TikTok. But they came up with a new algorithmic way of curating these short form videos. And again, the network effects kicked in.

6:56So my own view has come around to don't rely on this idea that you can sort of chop them up into nice, neat little bits and they'll sort of stay like that. It's such a liquid, fast moving technology. I just don't think that would work. But I do think there's always more that can be done to give users more rights over their own experience, to give all of us more transparency over how these systems work, to make sure that there isn't sort of price gouging going on in the way that the actual businesses are run. So I think it's more about control and transparency rather than breakup if you want to square that circle.

7:28But the fact remains, you do end up with an enormous amount of power aggregated in the hands of a very small number of people. And just to push back on it for a moment, one thing, I mean, TikTok is very rare and very exceptional in that, you know, there aren't that many others that came through to rival kind of Instagram and Snapchat in as quick a way as TikTok did. TikTok produced an extraordinary service that a lot of people liked, but they're an exception rather than the norm. a couple of other things in your book which struck me as sort of hesitations you have about the way in which popular ideas around technology are discussed in the mainstream.

7:59One is about the impact of social media and smartphones on kids. And you get into this in the book. And you're very much at pains to cite lots and lots of academic papers, including from people at the Oxford Internet Institute, which I've been up to and reported from at length. And it is worth saying, and I'd say this honestly, it's my judgment having four kids as I do and being quite obsessed with the subject, that the evidence connecting smartphone use to a deterioration in teenage mental health in particular is at the very least messy. Of its nature, it struggles to be definitive because we haven't had many, many years of it.

8:35And it's not an emphatic thing one way or another. And yet you still have some strong views on it. Can you just take us what you read to be your dispassionate reading of the evidence around smartphones and kids? What I try and do in the book, this is such an emotive issue, you know, particularly if you're a parent. I'm a parent of three kids. I mean, two grownups, but a teenager, you know, like any parent, you constantly worry about what are they experiencing online and so on and so forth. So it's very emotive. And we're in a sort of moment in time where we're just more and more proposals being put forward to kind of just strip away the threat of technology almost generically from our children's lives.

9:11And so what I try and do in the book, rather than insert myself, I just try and present as much evidence as I could find from rigorous, credible analysts and researchers. And as you say, at a societal level, I'm not talking individually, at a societal level, it is exceptionally difficult to assert with real clarity and confidence that there is a causal link between the use of social media or indeed screen time and mental well-being. and not least because it just doesn't seem to operate across countries. If you look at early evidence, there's a correlation between rising, particularly among teenage girls in America, which is where studies from the use of Instagram, particularly after 2014, and rising rates of depression and anxiety amongst teenage girls.

9:54Since then, there are academic studies now suggesting there is stronger evidence for a causal link. Having looked at all of that evidence, harbouring, as I do, quite a lot of scepticism about some of the sweeping claims made, particularly when I see how very useful and positive many online experiences were for kids during the pandemic during the whole period of the lockdown and when I think it's just obvious is kids are finding their own identity through their teen years being able to communicate with others find interests find communities that they feel a part of is incredibly important and positive and so on so I thought to myself that all being the case I think you want to avoid throwing the baby out of the bathwater which is where I think quite all the debate's heading now it's like you and get rid of technology altogether from sort of teen lives.

10:39But I do think that big companies need to be put under far, far greater pressure to build what are called age-appropriate experiences. You can decide whether the age-appropriate threshold should be 14, 15, 13. It tends to be 13 in many places, but sometimes it varies. But you need to put much more pressure on the companies to do that. I've got no problem with the idea that schools should basically be phone-free zones. They shouldn't be technology-free zones. I think technology is incredibly powerful. Of course, if you don't have a projector, you might have a... But this is where I hope we sort of end up sort of trying to draw distinctions and try and introduce a bit of nuance in a debate that's very difficult to introduce nuance because it's so emotive.

11:20You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

12:02With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport. And the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action, bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

12:58West Coast American companies in our world of technology and the ways in which we've misunderstood the lessons from the past 15 years. In his view, we got an awful lot wrong over the last 15 years, but we also got an awful lot right. And yet, as we embark on the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence, he thinks we're failing to learn the correct lessons from that decade and a half. It is a smart, interesting, I hope useful conversation about the way in which technology and the power flowing from it is reshaping our world at a pretty alarming rate. OK, let's return to my conversation with Sir Nick Clegg.

13:34What's Mark Zuckerberg like, really? He's an engineer. He's sort of very techie. He's very immersed in engineering. He's like a lot of those people who excel in that world. He gets very, very immersed in things. He's got this extraordinary ability to focus. He's remorselessly competitive. I'll tell you one thing that I liked about him, which somewhat surprised me. I kind of thought if you're one of the richest people on the planet and you've been living this abnormal life, completely abnormal. I mean, films were being made about him when he was, like, 21. But one thing that surprised me was he retains, which is quite unusual, he retains an unusual ability to listen.

14:12Doesn't mean he's not very assertive when he's made up his mind. Doesn't mean he's very stubborn, which he can be when he's made up his mind. but he has this sort of almost technologist view. If he doesn't understand something, he needs to learn all about it. He needs to talk to the people who do know about it and sort of suck up all their knowledge and then come to a view. I know he's a friend of yours and in the end he can defend himself but there's just one thing which is again a common sort of a motif about him which is that basically in his pivot to Trump you see someone who's put the pursuit of power and pragmatism above principle.

14:46They look at this guy who's taken up jujitsu. They look at this guy who goes on Joe Rogan's podcast and says he likes the odd bit of masculine energy. They look at your departure from the company. They look at the appointment of Dana White, who's this kind of kingpin of UFC ultimate fighting in America. And they say, hang on a second, Mark, you were this Harvard liberal. You were this kind of open up the world, connect everyone type when that was the right way to go in the age of Obama. and now there's something about his pivot to Trump and they find it a little bit, not just tone deaf, but a little bit sickening actually.

15:20Yeah, I mean, look, two things I'd say. Firstly, don't be surprised that the people, and it's not just Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook at Apple, Sergey Brin, for heaven's sake, who used to be an absolutely prominent progressive Democrat, but all of these people, they're business people. They're running businesses. We shouldn't imagine that these people, they might claim that they are, they're not. They're not philosopher kings, they're not moral leaders. Don't look to them for that. But they've asserted themselves, Shinri. Well, that I've always disliked. And it was one of the first things I said when I arrived.

15:50So stop all this crap of somehow pretending that, you know, that Silicon Valley and the Brickford's a moral... They want to connect the world, they want to spread power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't bear all of that. So it's obviously not true. They are great technologists, they're great innovators, they're great builders, but I wouldn't look to them, which is why I remain firmly with the view that governments should remain absolutely in the driving seat on the big judgments about the trade-offs that technologies like this bring when they're taken up at such huge scale in society. I don't actually think many of them would take this as a critique.

16:21Their first duty, they think, to themselves, to their employees, to their shareholders, is that their company should prevail. And that's what they care about. That's what they think about every waking minute. Why did you want to leave? Was it because the atmospherics were changing? Was it because you'd done your time? Was it because you felt out of sync with the new vibe? Why did you want to go? Yeah, all of those above. Yeah, a mix of all of those things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we'd also, yeah, exactly. You actually put it more pithily than I probably would. Yeah, all of those kind of obviously.

16:51Look, here's the irony in the many, many debates over many years that we would have internally in a company like that, with the board, with Mark Zuckerberg and so on. I was the only person who'd actually been elected to anything. And I was always, and I was always noted, but here's the thing. I was always the most prominent voice saying, listen, you need to rebuild relationships with governments. You can't just be at war with them all the time. That was a big bit of my day job. You know, I always say there's only one thing worse in a sort of capitalist economy than having big businesses and governments at each other's throats.

17:24It's having them in each other's pockets. You've got to strike the right balance. And I was always the advocate of, you know, you've got to have some, a bit of an arm's length relationship. I argued for many years ago, didn't prevail. I actually argued even that getting out of the business of running political ads on Facebook altogether, globally. I just thought the more we could get out of politics, the better. So obviously when the decision was, and it wasn't a decision as such, it wasn't sort of you don't wake up one morning and decide this. It was a massive vibe shift, which really brewed from 2020 onwards, polarization around the lockdown and the 2020 election and so on.

17:57And then, of course, the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. That really moved the Overton window in a big time, in a big time in Silicon Valley. When I saw the whole of Silicon Valley, it wasn't the company I worked for, was just going to go really go massively into politics when I'd always kind of said, I think, and I still remain of that view. I remain of the view that private sector enterprise and innovation flourishes best when it's at a respectable distance from political power. Because guess what? Political power is it changes all the time and is very self-interested. Let's talk about those changes.

18:28Based on everything you've seen in Silicon Valley and before that in politics, can you just give our listeners a sense of where you think all of this is going? In terms of the concentrations of power, in terms of what they need to do now to get ahead of these trends and to not lose out in a world that seems to be being remade around them by these very powerful people? The first thing I'd say, and I worry about this, is what we experience online is a very great speed mutating from something that was driven by humans. It was content that humans would generate, good, bad, lovely, ugly, to content that is synthetically generated and algorithmically recommended to you.

19:09So these great platforms, which is actually one of the reasons I was always, if unfashionably, defenders of them, they were platforms for human expression. Human content, human connection will increasingly become pipelines for algorithmically recommended entertainment content, where we as humans become, if you like, more passive recipients of both synthetically generated content, which is then automatically recommended to us. This is my profound concern. You know, I've got a great phrase for this, to paraphrase Grace Jones, which is, I think we're becoming slave to the algorithm. Yeah, and here's the irony of ironies.

19:49I think a lot of the critique of what I call social media one was wrong and was wider than Mark, because I think it underestimated how much agency humans had. But weirdly enough, it's a critique that I think is coming into its own, or will do, as we move into a more synthetic environment. That's so annoying. That was supposed to be my critique. Oh, no, but here's the thing to your point about power. And I think this trend of what I call in the book, the power paradox, that these technologies empower us, but aggregate and concentrate so much power into the hands of the people who run these industries, I think that's going to happen with Nobson because we're all going to, certainly if that's, you listen to anyone really from Dario Amadei to Elon Musk, it doesn't matter what sort of spectrum they come from in terms of the debate around AI.

20:35They're all aiming for the same thing, which is that we all end up becoming very dependent on agentic AI, on AIs that do everything from help us cook, plan our holiday to share our deepest, darkest fears and thoughts and so on. Agentics in agents or assistants. Correct. Correct. And so you're going to have a level of personalized dependency on AI entities, which are synthetic entities, which is quite, quite different to being connected with another human being via Facebook, you know, circa five years ago, which is certainly the industry I worked in at that time. And yet at the same time, of course, the underlying physics that produces that very personal agentic AI, call them Bob, call them Susan, who may even appear in very realistic sort of avatar form to us soon, will be based on a technology which is very, very centralising at its source.

21:29To build these foundation models in the first place is only something that very, very small number of private sector entities. I mean, it's worth dwelling on this. The UK government, if it wanted to, would not be able to spend the money that one, never mind all of them collectively, that one of these American companies is spending every year at the moment. Can I put some numbers, just to really spell out for people? Microsoft, which is currently worth, I think, around about market cap, up or down, around$3 trillion, will say we're going to spend$40 billion. I'm making this up. No more. Much more.

21:56Okay,$50 billion,$100 billion. This is very energy-intensive stuff. And meanwhile, you've got the UK government that can't find 5 billion of welfare savings. What we're talking about here is an extraordinary financial power of those building this technology, which is a corporate power, a company power, an institutional, private sector power, which is partly about, by the way, infrastructure, energy consumption, about how you generate that energy, where does it come from, versus governments that can't find, which is skin. Correct. But my point is that the expense of building what I call the base layer exacerbates the power paradox we talked about earlier.

22:33If only a very small number of very, very wealthy entities can build the stuff in the first place. And they're also the entities that then deliver your Bob or your Susan in sort of almost imposter human form. This bifurcation of power where we become ever more reliant on this technology in a highly personalized way. and at the same time it can only be delivered to us through the deep, deep pocketed entities in China and the US. So I think all of that is a concoction which is going to create ethical, moral and political dilemmas which make the kind of people who will do my job that I did for a while in Silicon Valley, you can call it interesting but also very, very challenging.

23:18And all of this, of course, is taking place, since you asked for big trends, in the context in which the American sort of techno-political establishment, which is really now congealed under Trump too, believes, as far as I can make out from what I've heard privately and what you read publicly, believe that they can deliver a knockout blow against China, that this existential race for AI supremacy is akin to outspending the Soviets. And there'll be a sort of Berlin Wall moment when one of these big American entities, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, will suddenly deliver AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, or superhuman intelligence.

23:59They'll somehow then be able to put that technology in a box, lock it and say, we are going to prevail forever and on. I think that's nonsense. I don't think that's going to happen. I just don't think America is going to beat China like that. I don't think there will be a knockout blow. If you look at the way the Chinese are already actually leading, here's the irony, in open source technology, which is democratising the technology for free around the world. Here's the irony. So you've got the world's greatest autocracy that is, oddly enough, in its competition against the world's greatest democracy, America, doing more to democratise the technology that they're competing over.

24:34And so I think at some point, the American political and economic establishment will realise that they're not going to win. They're not going to win on this current trajectory. And if they want to win, they're going to have to relearn something they've clearly lost under these last few months under Trump. They're going to have to relearn working in leadership through partnership.