Clegg calls on Europe to drop threats to break up Facebook and unite against China
Sir Nick Clegg has urged policymakers to abandon threats to break up Facebook and instead unite against Chinese censorship of the internet.
Facebook's head of global affairs and Britain's former deputy prime minister called on Europe and the US to "turn off the white noise and begin to work together".
At a speech in Berlin on Monday, he argued that a failure to do so could cause the West to “sleepwalk into a new era where the internet is no longer a universal space”.
Instead, he said it would be a series of silos where different countries set their own rules and authoritarian regimes collect citizens’ data while restricting their freedom.
The former leader of the Liberal Democrats said that we are in a "critical moment" where others, like China, are writing the "new rules of the internet themselves".
“The Great Firewall of China means great swathes of what we think of as the internet – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp included – are unreachable by its citizens and much of the content they can access is heavily censored," he claimed.
He added that Russia is increasingly following China's lead, trying to force companies to store data on national soil.
The comments follow remarks earlier this year by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who called for the social media network to be broken up in order to rein in the "staggering" power wielded by Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive.
However last month Margrethe Vestager, Europe's competition commissioner, said that breaking up Facebook - which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp - should be considered only as a "very last resort" because it would involve years of legal battles.
“We need to work together to rewrite the rules [of the internet],” said Sir Nick, who used his speech to claim that Facebook "has changed" and reiterate his belief that increased regulation of tech firms can not be done solely by the internet companies themselves.
He said it should not be left to a private company to "decide who is or isn't a legitimate participant in an election".
Sir Nick also slammed calls to break up the company as an often "exaggerated and lopsided debate".
"We are perilously close to squandering the good of social media by overreacting to the bad," he argued.
"If you listened to some of our more breathless critics you could be forgiven for thinking that we are single-handedly dismantling western democracy: collaborating with the Russians, the Iranians, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati and the guys who faked the moon landings to manipulate our citizens, rig elections and tear down our democratic institutions."
The former deputy prime minister has said the social network plans to set up an independent oversight board to which people can appeal against content decisions made by Facebook.
He also defended the company, saying it was the victim of a "tech lash".
Earlier on Monday, Sir Nick told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there was "absolutely no evidence" that Russia influenced the EU referendum result using Facebook.
He also dismissed claims that Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy which is believed to have harvested personal Facebook data via a third party app, swayed people's decision to vote Leave in 2016.
But the vice president for global affairs and communications at the social network did acknowledge Facebook did deserve criticism for some of its actions during the 15 years since its launch.
He said that the "company's attitude to the use of data in its early years" was one area where criticism was fair.
