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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

Curious how Nick Clegg has changed his tune on data collection since he went to work for Facebook. When he was leader of the Liberal Democrats and UK Deputy PM, he was strongly in favour of a data "Bill of Rights" that would limit and control data collection and sharing. I wonder what changed his mind?

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The fact that the number two executive [0] at Facebook/Meta is a former legislator and politician who's responsible for lobbying governments shows just how much of an existential threat Facebook face.

Facebook/Meta are at the "cigarette company fighting for its right to operate" stage of its existence. They know they prey on people, and are ultimately "responsible" for a coming mental health crisis, disinformation, and potentially worse in some countries.

My bet is, just as with cigarette and oil companies, we will discover in 30 years time that Facebook had unpublished research into just how bad for the world some of their activities are.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60410636

> The move puts the former Lib Dem leader on a par with Mr Zuckerberg himself

> Mr Zuckerberg said Meta needed "a senior leader at the level of myself... who can lead and represent us for all of our policy issues globally".

> My bet is, just as with cigarette and oil companies, we will discover in 30 years time that Facebook had unpublished research into just how bad for the world some of their activities are.

Ahem...

  Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

https://archive.is/zhGBC

Tip of the iceberg.

FB internal researches have already found that Instagram is having negative impacts on the mental health of teenagers: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/09/14/faceboo...

Not just any politician/legislator: He was deputy PM of the UK for 5 years.

IMO it's much worse than cigarettes, in that the ills that Facebook delivers upon us is very nuanced and isn't a concrete object like a cigarette is. It's only when you start pulling all the pieces of FB together (commenting, sharing, liking, friend graphs, etc.) that it starts becoming a bad thing.

Maybe data privacy turns out to be the "lower receiver" of social media but I doubt it.

Clegg's credibility in the UK is pretty poor due to some well publicised policy u-turns during his tenure in political power, most notable being tuition fees. He went from hero to zero very quickly over there, becoming almost an archetype of the slimey, untrustworthy politician.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/12/nick-clegg-...

I can’t help but feel that Clegg get an unfair rep for that. The tuition fees thing was never going to happen, and was always put out by the Lib Dem’s to apply pressure to the two main parties (Conservative and Labour).

The Lib Dem’s then made the fatal mistake of actually making it into government, which they obviously never anticipated happening when they originally made the tuition fees promise.

Personally I think Clegg and Lib Dem’s did a fantastic job of reigning in the worst aspects of the Tory party, and the UK public raking them over coals for tuition fees has only benefited the Tories by removing the only thing that stopped them going off the rails completely. Which of course happened immediately after the Tories got rid of the Lib Dem’s and we got Brexit a year later

Nah, they made a commitment against tuition fees which they then reversed spectacularly. If they'd merely said, "since we're unable to agree on the changes to tuition fees they will be left at current levels in this parliament", I think people would have accepted that. It was the (three-line whip) voting to treble them that did them in.

It was the Cameron/Clegg government that normalised food banks in British society.

I'd like to know what the fantastic job they done was, because if it's solely holding off a Brexit situation for 5 years I could argue their relatively weak opposition whilst in coalition actively enabled a shift further to the right and their extremely weak position by 2015 allowed Cameron to be so assured of the centre-right vote that he could court the UKIP vote with a referendum he assumed would never pass.

He did get voting reform to the point of a referendum in the UK at least, which regardless of how badly it was executed is something (and I don't think I can blame him for that too much, it was doomed with the UK's media), it's just a shame that seems to be the entirety of what he managed.

There may be some truth to that, and they did get the Conservatives to run a referendum on changing the electoral system from "First Past The Post" to "Alternative Vote". In some ways, getting that referendum should have been an incredible win worth sacrificing some short term policies. Unfortunately the campaign for the change was a disaster, and the misinformation and fear mongering about the change pushed the country to vote it down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

Good points. I guess a counter is if seemingly 'cast-iron' pledges are put out there for the electorate (such as the scrapping of tuition fees) and people subsequently turn out in big numbers to vote for them (this was the year people were turned away due to large queues forming at the polling stations - obvs not all students voting for Lib Dems but you see my point) it's understandable that people will expect said pledges to be delivered on. The Lib Dem’s flagship political broadcast was titled “Say goodbye to broken promises” for example. The ire is understandable, whether one agrees or not.

> Unfortunately the campaign for the change was a disaster, and the misinformation and fear mongering about the change pushed the country to vote it down.

It was an absolutely extraordinary level of bullshit, especially the ads trading off changing the voting system cost vs NHS funding, which was really a prelude to how bad the Brexit debate would be.

I dunno how much the campaign for reform can be blamed really; the bulk of the political and media classes were rabidly against it and it's very easy to make any kind of PR sound more confusing than it is.

It was the electorate that got rid of the LibDems, not the Tories. They went from 57 MPs to 8, largely because they broke promises like the one on tuition fees.

> I wonder what changed his mind?

Probably a lack of integrity.

He has millions of reasons, really.

Nick Clegg isn't mentioned in the article - what are you basing the statement that he's changed his mind on?

I am basing it on my knowledge of the story, which I gained by reading things. Feel free to do the same.

About £10m in Meta shares, apparently.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

-- Upton Sinclair

This is par for the course. Critical voices get hired. It's a 'win win' in the sense that the critical voice gets to shut up and they get some money out of it. /s

Money is often a compelling argument.

I wish people would stop assuming that all politicians believe in the things they propose. Many are basically sociopaths who just agree with whatever gets them votes.

almost all of them are imo - if in office and that office manages 1M or more people. Those aren't usually aren't elected sadly because they aren't willing to sell their souls.

There are good odds that a sociopath will start to show up...and who wants to tell others how to live their lives....sociopaths and antisocial people....great choice of leaders but time and again...they lie and cheat and steal and make sure they look good for the pictures....so you elect them to give themselves raise, increase homelessness, increase poverty and spread policies that kill.....and enslave the future.

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