Does anyone like nick clegg

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Clegg was one of them, having held on to the constituency of Sheffield Hallam, a largely middle-class corner of the city that nudges the Peak District. After the US election and the arrival in the White House of Donald Trump, the company was the focus of huge questions about misinformation, polarisation and online political meddling perpetrated by Russia. In the spring of , Facebook was hit by a scandal surrounding the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica , which had harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters.

At around the same time, outrage exploded about the role apparently played by Facebook in the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The EU was making increasingly loud noises about the power of so-called big tech — and its avoidance of taxes. For Facebook, all this noise meant it had to change its approach to the policies that governed its content, as well as its public relations.

It also had to prepare for an international wave of government regulation that was, sooner or later, going to break. Sandberg and Zuckerberg quickly decided that his ideal replacement would be an experienced politician from Europe. This is a crucial point. Given the coming likely regulatory friction with Washington, why is Facebook hiring someone without deep connections there?

Sir Nick responds that the company can see a lot of policy innovation and momentum is coming out of Europe. Sir Nick has written to the Facebook leadership on his views about a range of subjects. To the question of whether or not he has sold out for money, he responds that he is a private citizen, and that he has written to the Cabinet Office to ask that the stipend he gets for public work, as a former deputy prime minister, should come to a close when his office in the UK shuts.

Sir Nick used to negotiate trade deals in Brussels and will deepen connections between the European Commission and the US west coast. Still, it is surprising that Facebook plumped for a senior European, as opposed to an American or Chinese politician. The company's share price is reasonably flat over the year but it has taken a reputational battering, because of the data scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, fake accounts, evidence of Russian meddling in the presidential election and many other problems.

Perhaps most astonishingly, Facebook has admitted that it inflated the number of people watching videos on its platform. If Facebook can't be relied upon to provide accurate information about what value advertisers are getting from it, the foundations of its business could crumble fast. Almost all Facebook revenue comes from advertising. For Sir Nick, this is a new chapter. The bruising experience of the coalition years followed his becoming the embodiment of student anger of tuition fees.

In , his party was humiliated, but not badly enough for him to be thrown out by the electorate. That came in instead. He's been working on the frontier between technology and politics for the last few years.

He has a baroness grandmother, a banker father and a Dutch mother. He spent his gap year teaching skiing in Austria, a summer as a banker in Helsinki and was once arrested for setting fire to some rare cacti in Munich. A liberal like Clegg would never go so far as to use Facebook for censorship, much less censor a guy who was president four months ago.

Which is: The best way to win an argument is to find a way to shut the other side up. Contact The Author Name required.