Global affairs president on censors and censorbility
Facebook-Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg has called for governments to support what he calls The Open Internet and warned of an unprecedented threat to networking.
Politico magazine recently put five questions to Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the UK and his answers give impression that the open internet is something select governments should be defending. However, when he elaborates, the global affairs expert seemed oblivious to the effect his own company has on public life – or global affairs.
Asked what governments could do next on tech, the social media spokesman claimed that the Internet is ‘largely free’ but under ‘unprecedented threat’. The answers revealed little about Facebook’s policy on freedom of speech, paying for the infrastructure for mobile content or how the social media giant will work with mobile operators to monetise the metaverse, according to privacy campaigner Reclaim The Net (RTN). The answer do reveal that Clegg does not understand the Internet, RTN said.
According to RTN the threat to the open internet mainly comes from Facebook, which ‘censors millions of posts each quarter and works with US government to censor content that the White House flags’. RTN conceded that Clegg might be unaware of the irony that it’s Meta and the governments that it collaborates with that are destroying free speech.
Instead, Clegg lamented the fact China has effectively created its own internet and claims that he is opposed to that. The authoritarian nature of Chinese government surveillance, and its social segregation are lamentable, whereas his own company’s secret policing of the global internet is not. “It’s a fair assumption that what really bothers Meta and its ilk is far less noble: could it be the inability to access a market of more than a billion people to further feed their business models based on mass harvesting of personal data?” said RTN’s Christina Maas.
Other mass mobile internet markets are moving in the same authoritarian direction as China, said Clegg, notably Russia and Turkey. Maas asked if Facebook’s global affairs supremo could be unaware that Facebook’s business is surveillance marketing and censorship of billions of people around the world each day.
Maas wondered how Clegg could deliver these ironic statements about the loss of open society, the right to privacy and free speech without embarrassment. “Clegg doesn’t want democracies to idly sit by as the personal data market shrinks for Facebook and others – but this former politician frames this as his concern over digital nationalism and a fragmented internet that is not only weaponised toward cyber warfare but also heavily censored,” said Maas.
Clegg failed to mention what exactly democracies should do about the loss of the open internet or how governments should proceed with its defence. Meta’s head of global affairs did not explain what his understanding of the open internet is.