When the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg joined Facebook in 2018, the company was immersed in a number of scandals. Cambridge Analytica had been harvesting personal data from Facebook profiles. UN human rights experts said the platform had played a role in facilitating the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Its policies during the 2016 US presidential election had come under fire. Now Clegg has taken a top role as the company’s president of global affairs. Will he be able to tackle the seemingly endless problems with the way that Facebook – which recently rebranded as Meta – works?
For better or worse, Meta and Google have become the infrastructure of the digital public sphere. On Facebook, people access the news, social movements grow, human rights abuses are documented and politicians engage with constituents. Herein lies the problem. No single company should hold this much power over the global public sphere.
