Nick Clegg is blasted for ‘bizarre’ rant about Facebook’s war with Australia

Nick Clegg was today blasted for a ‘bizarre’, ‘patronising’ and ‘disingenuous’ rant about Facebook’s war with Australia over paying for news content.

The former deputy PM, now vice president of global affairs at the tech giant on a reputed seven-figure salary, moaned its position had been ‘misunderstood’ in an extraordinary blog posted on an official site.

Claiming to be telling the ‘real’ story of the standoff, Sir Nick said Facebook temporarily blocked the sharing of news stories in Australia because a new law would have left it signing a ‘blank cheque’ to publishers. 

He griped that the platform did not ask people to share news, comparing the situation to ‘forcing carmakers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car, and letting the stations set the price’. 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally agreed to end the week-long blockade of news after Australian ministers significantly watered down the laws.

Commons Culture Committee chair Julian Knight was among those slating Sir Nick – who took the job and moved to California after being humiliatingly ejected from Parliament at the 2017 election – over his justification.

‘Nick Clegg’s bizarre statements remind me of the old saying if you are in a hole stop digging,’ the Tory MP told MailOnline. 

‘The idea that Facebook is some sort of innocent drawn into a row because of its pesky users posting news stories stretches credulity to breaking point. 

‘To use an analogy of Clegg-like proportions, it’s like blaming students for the 2010 Lib Dem manifesto promising to abolish tuition fees.’

Former culture committee chair Damian Collins told MailOnline the article was ‘pretty disingenuous’ and patronising ‘even by his own high standards’. 

‘He implied that Facebook is doing the news industry a favour. If you look what has happened in Australia, not only do Facebook and Google control 80 per cent of the advertising market, since 2006 ad revenues for newspapers have fallen by over 50 per cent,’ Mr Collins said. 

‘That has led to papers closing, journalists being laid off, it has created a real problem which is what the competition authorities are trying to address.

‘Nick Clegg seems to neither understand nor care about anything like that.

‘He completely ignores the fact that Facebook makes money by people engaging with content on its platform. 

‘It sells advertising against that. And that includes sharing news articles.’

The Tory MP went on: ‘Facebook has got a business model where it makes money out of other people’s content and other people’s data, and it doesn’t think it should have to pay for it.

‘The time has come when it does.’ 

Facebook claims it will have the power to pick and choose who it pays for news after Australia’s new media laws come into force, handing the company a powerful weapon in its fight over paid content. 

Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president of news partnerships, said Australian ministers assured him today the site will be free ‘to support the publishers we choose to’ after new bargaining laws are voted into force later this week.

The rule could allow Facebook to ban companies demanding higher prices for their news while using cheaper rivals – a significant loophole in legislation that was designed to ‘level the playing field’ between tech firms and publishers.

It could also allow Facebook to block news outlets who are critical of the site, though the final deal has yet to be published.

The concessions will have global ramifications. The UK, EU and US are all considering whether to pass similar rules, but will now find it much harder to go beyond the precedent set in Australia. 

Writing online in a blog post titled The Real Story Of What Happened With News On Facebook In Australia, Sir Nick said that while it was ‘understandable’ that some news publishers ‘see Facebook as a potential source of money to make up for their losses’, it would not have been fair to be able to demand a ‘blank cheque’.

‘That’s what the Australian law, as it was proposed, would have done,’ Sir Nick said.

‘Facebook would have been forced to pay potentially unlimited amounts of money to multinational media conglomerates under an arbitration system that deliberately misdescribes the relationship between publishers and Facebook — without even so much as a guarantee that it is used to pay for journalism, let alone support smaller publishers.’

He insisted: ‘We neither take nor ask for the content for which we were being asked to pay a potentially exorbitant price. 

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden is set to meet with Facebook executives over the tech giant’s decision after Downing Street said it was ‘concerned’ about the situation.

Sir Nick said Facebook was ‘more than willing to partner with news publishers’ and pointed to its Facebook News service, which pays news publishers for their content and recently launched in the UK.

The former Lib Dem leader said Facebook was open to discussing greater regulation of the tech sector.

‘There are legitimate concerns to be addressed about the size and power of tech companies, just as there are serious issues about the disruption the internet has caused to the news industry,’ he said.  

Australian Treasurer Josh Fryberg has painted the move as a victory, saying Facebook will now negotiate deals to pay for content – albeit with a stronger negotiating hand than it had last week. 

Key changes agreed by Australia are that the law will not apply if Facebook can show a ‘significant contribution’ to Australian journalism by striking its own deals with news publishers.

If the law is going to be applied, then Facebook will be given one month’s notice – allowing the company more time to strike deals and wiggle out of regulation.  

Even after the law is applied, Facebook will have a further two months to negotiate deals on its terms and will only be forced into arbitration – which would set a fixed price for news content – ‘as a last resort’.

In effect, it means arbitration is unlikely to ever be used and encourages deals to be struck ahead of time – with Mr Frydenberg telling media companies to ‘get out there and talk to Facebook’ as he announced the changes on Tuesday. 

The new rules also state that Facebook is free to offer different fees to different news organisations as a result of its negotiations, and will not have to reveal the inner workings of their closely-guarded algorithms or disclose data. 

Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships, also claimed the site will retain control over which news organisations get to appear.

‘Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to forced negotiation,’ he said.

‘We have come to an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to, including small and local publishers.’

While the final details of the deal have yet to be seen, giving Facebook the option of blocking certain news sites would hand it significant bargaining power while weakening the hand of publishers in negotiations. 

How uber-Liberal Nick Clegg is living the Californian dream in ‘America’s most expensive zip code’ – with his millions from Facebook, the world’s ‘most illiberal firm’ 

Nestled in the heart of California‘s Silicon Valley, the sleepy hamlet of Atherton has been crowned ‘America’s most expensive zip code’ for each of the past four years.

The average house costs £5 million and the 7,000 uber-wealthy residents include tech titans Eric Schmidt, former head of Google, and Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.

Atherton screams ‘new’ money – and lots of it. But that doesn’t stop the villagers priding themselves on impeccably liberal credentials.

In November’s US Presidential election, nearly 80 per cent of them cast their vote in favour of Democrat Joe Biden – and against Republican President Donald Trump.

What better place, then, to find Sir Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Lib Dem leader who is now Facebook’s Vice-President for Global Affairs and Communications?

Life seems good for the 54-year-old, who once led the Coalition Government with David Cameron. He shares a £7 million mansion with wife Miriam and gets by on a salary reported to be £2.7 million a year.

Clegg has taken to life here with ease. Before lockdown, he was often seen cycling the three miles from his home to Facebook’s Menlo Park HQ wearing workout clothes and flip-flops.

This is the man who once declared: ‘If you scratch below the surface and ask what really makes me tick, it’s the liberalism of trying to promote freedom and opportunity.’ So it seems an irony that Clegg’s new life in the sunshine is funded by an organisation increasingly described as a threat to democracy.

Last week, Facebook caused consternation around the Western world. Faced with demands from an elected government that it pay for the news content it copies from others and promotes, the tech giant reacted by censoring Australian Facebook pages and simply removing the news feeds.

Clegg is now at the heart of negotiations with the Australian government. Canada is threatening to introduce similar legislation.

The clouds have been gathering for some time. Google and Facebook already face demands that they be broken up, with anti-trust suits against them in US courts.

And in their treatment of Trump – effectively silenced by Facebook and Twitter while he was still President – the tech giants have been described as both illiberal and unaccountable. Facebook, with its 2.8 billion unique users a month, wields more power than most countries – and knows it.

Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, said: ‘Facebook has more monthly users than there are notional adherents to Christianity; roughly twice as many as there are people in China.

‘When your numbers are that big your ego can give you the illusion that you are a nation state.’

Not that the Cleggs will meet much criticism in Atherton. Miriam, 52, says life in Silicon Valley is ‘a bit like living in the Vatican’, adding: ‘It’s slightly insular, massively wealthy. It’s not so diversified and is mostly run by men.’

One local said: ‘This is a place you find people driving Teslas rather than Lamborghinis. You can’t swing a cat without hitting a billionaire but that’s part of the charm. Gardeners, maids and other service people come in at sunrise and leave at sunset. It’s a safe haven for the super-rich and those aspiring to be.’

Lady Clegg works as a lawyer while running a charity called Inspiring Girls and cultivating a vegetable patch in the grounds of the couple’s two-storey faux Queen Anne house built in 2009. With an acre of land, huge outdoor swimming pool with hot-tub, a sun deck and an outdoor fireplace, the family have been well prepared for the privations of lockdown. The house has five bedrooms, six bathrooms and a dining room that seats 16.

But they should enjoy it while they can. One Hollywood power-broker who met Clegg shortly before the pandemic struck said he faced an ‘impossible’ task of trying to promote the idea Facebook can be a self-regulating force for good rather than a behemoth which puts profits before people.

‘He’s the ultimate liberal, living in the beating heart of liberal Silicon Valley, yet he works for the most un-liberal company in the world,’ he said, while adding that he found Clegg ‘a very likeable guy’.

‘He was basically brought into Facebook to help the company’s image and that of Mark Zuckerberg personally. He went around the room promising to make the company more transparent, saying it would be more accountable, that it wouldn’t just ignore criticism but would embrace it. Let’s be honest – his job is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. But comparing Facebook to a pig is being unfair to pigs. Facebook has continued to put profits and growth before users’ safety and privacy.’

Clegg’s supporters point to improvements he has made since joining the company, including helping to create an Oversight Board – an ‘independent’ committee which will have the ultimate say on content.

The Hollywood source added: ‘He’s not hated but he’s not managed to score a huge victory. The jury’s still out. He’s facing a thankless task. The reality is probably he will move on, head held high. But this has been a job that has given his family a life-altering income.’

For the first time since Facebook was founded in 2004, the world is waking up to the threat it poses – along with Google, Amazon and the rest. But that’s unlikely to ruffle the Cleggs in their Californian mansion as, day by day, the money keeps rolling in.