When Mark Zuckerberg brought Nick Clegg aboard Facebook in 2018, the former British deputy prime minister faced a mounting crisis. The platform's carefully cultivated image as a space for genuine human connection was crumbling under scrutiny from politicians and the public alike. Concerns mounted over the platform's role in spreading disinformation—including Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—its links to terrorism, and its privacy violations.
Clegg spent more than six years at what became Meta, managing the company's public relations challenges before departing in January 2025 as president for global affairs. By one measure, his tenure proved remarkably successful: despite relentless scandals and a costly failed venture into virtual reality, Meta achieved extraordinary profitability and maintained its position as the world's dominant social media corporation. Yet his legacy, shared with Zuckerberg, is one of profound dishonesty and human damage—affecting billions of users and societies worldwide.
Clegg's new book, How to Save the Internet: The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict (Bodley Head/Penguin, September 2025), attempts to recast him as a guerrilla reformer. Instead, the 320-page volume reads as a tedious exercise in self-justification. Rather than offering genuine insider perspective on decision-making at a corporate giant, Clegg appears bound by nondisclosure agreements, leaving readers starved for meaningful revelation. What emerges instead is a masterwork of the sophistry and misdirection that defined his Meta career.
The Zuckerberg Question
Clegg's true feelings about his former boss remain opaque. Early passages lavish praise on Zuckerberg as a "visionary innovator" with "endless curiosity" and "indefatigable competitiveness." Yet the only two memorable anecdotes Clegg provides about the CEO both inadvertently portray him as foolish.
In one, Clegg recounts a 2024 meeting between Zuckerberg and French President Emmanuel Macron featuring a demonstration of Meta's artificial intelligence work. "The president's faith in AI can hardly have been boosted," Clegg writes, "when the AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta glasses Mark showed off mistook a Pierre Soulages painting for a solar panel." Clegg leaves it at that, offering no discussion of Meta's persistent consumer AI shortcomings. Notably, Zuckerberg suffered another embarrassing Ray-Ban AI glasses failure on September 25, 2025, during a widely publicized Meta Connect demonstration.
The second episode involves the absurd 2023 back-and-forth between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk over a mixed martial arts cage match that never materialized. Clegg reports that Musk withdrew, then describes a corporate off-site retreat featuring an MMA training session in Zuckerberg's personal facility:
We all paired off to practice some moves under the watchful eyes of Mark's professional instructors, which meant I found myself wrestling with my then-deputy, Joel Kaplan. At one point, this involved a maneuver apparently known as the 'Domination Mount,' in which Joel straddled me and we grappled awkwardly in a way that was, let's just say, too close for comfort. It was corporate bonding taken to a whole new level. Joel later jokingly confessed that he had considered reporting it to our then-head of HR, Lori Goler, but when he looked up to find her, he saw that she had Mark Zuckerberg in a chokehold.
Nick Clegg, How to Save the Internet
These episodes suggest Clegg harbors personal disdain for Zuckerberg—an intriguing possibility the book frustratingly fails to explore.
The Polarization Dodge
Social media's contribution to political polarization, political violence, degraded civic discourse, and adolescent mental health decline is well documented. Yet Clegg spends much of his book obscuring these realities through the same tactics that characterized his Meta tenure: constructing straw men and engaging in rhetorical sleight of hand.
Serious critiques of social media carefully note that the technology has contributed to polarization, facilitated political violence, and affected many users—not that it is the sole cause. Clegg, by contrast, consistently battles a distorted version of the indictment, one claiming that social media is the original, primary, or exclusive source of these harms. After citing studies for which Meta provided data to outside academics, he declares there is "a growing body of research showing there is little evidence that key features of Meta's platforms alone cause harmful affective polarization." That word—alone—drains the statement of meaning. Only a fool would argue that social media alone causes something as multifaceted as affective polarization.
Affective polarization refers to partisan hostility in which opponents are viewed not merely as wrong but as abhorrent and dangerous. Multiple factors have driven its rise in the United States since the 1960s: substantive political conflicts including backlash against civil rights movements for nonwhite and LGBTQ+ Americans; realignment of the major parties into a solidly conservative Republican Party concentrated in the South and a distinctly liberal Democratic Party anchored on the coasts; evolution of traditional media, particularly conservative talk radio in the late 1980s and hyper-partisan cable television in the late 1990s; and more recently, President Donald Trump's vituperative political strategy.
Building atop these trends, mass social media use has intensified partisan animosity. A 2020 article in Science by 15 researchers concluded that "social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have played an influential role in political discourse, intensifying political sectarianism." A separate team of five researchers wrote in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in August 2021: "Although social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization, we posit that it is often a key facilitator."
Clegg ignores this nuanced perspective, preferring word games. His book recycles earlier corporate blog posts and congressional testimony by Zuckerberg designed to distance social media from the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In an August 2023 Tech Policy Press article, founder Justin Hendrix and the author exposed not only Clegg's reliance on straw man deception but also his dramatic oversimplification of Meta-funded research. Those studies found that various interventions—such as replacing Facebook's engagement-ranking algorithm with reverse-chronological ranking—didn't significantly reduce polarization. Yet the interventions were so brief and entangled with other influences that they proved little. They certainly did not exonerate Meta as Clegg claimed then or claims now.
The Algorithm Question
Having muddied the connection between social media and polarization, Clegg also obscures the mechanism driving online conflict. The 15-scholar Science collective explained it clearly: "Social media technology employs popularity-based algorithms that tailor content to maximize user engagement." Maximizing engagement increases affective polarization, especially within "homogeneous networks" of like-minded users, "in part because of the contagious power of content that elicits sectarian fear or indignation."
The business model is straightforward: social media companies maximize engagement because user screen time and interaction directly correlate with advertising exposure—the source of their enormous profits. Content triggering partisan fear or anger spreads readily and fuels this advertising-dependent model.
Clegg's treatment of this mechanism is incoherent, suggesting intentional dishonesty. He first acknowledges that "when people's experience using Facebook or Instagram are full of negative emotions, they may be more likely to engage with the content they see, and as a result they may well spend more time on the app in the short term." Then, without evidence, he asserts: "But it's not what keeps them coming back day after day, month after month. For that to happen, they have to find the experience useful and meaningful."
This unsubstantiated distinction between short-term promotion of harmful content and supposed longer-term appeal of constructive material contradicts extensive research compiled by researcher Nathan Witkin. His findings show that "our attention on social media gravitates toward content that is more emotionally extreme." Studies demonstrate that "posts that are sad, fearful, uncivil, morally and emotionally indignant, hostile towards out-groups, and negatively valenced in general spread much further than their more neutral counterparts."
In a Substack essay titled "The Case Against Social Media Is Stronger Than You Think," Witkin articulates a broader concern:
The last decade and a half has seen the rise of a new class of political influencers who, empowered by social media's unique incentive environment, have come to exert near-symphonic control over the fear, anger, and tribalism of large sectors of the American public. The phrase 'political influencer' calls to mind names like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, but I mean it to refer to any content creator, pundit, journalist, or even politician with an active online presence oriented around the production of political content—so perhaps hundreds of thousands of users with followings of varying sizes. Despite accounting for only a small slice of the online population, this new influencer class is coming to dominate the market for political communication. In the process, it is transforming America's perception of itself, which, since America is a social entity constituted in part by its self-perceptions, just amounts to saying it is transforming America.
Nathan Witkin
Witkin calls this phenomenon "elite radicalization" and makes it central to his indictment of social media platforms. Clegg not only ignores Witkin's research synthesis but dismisses it by claiming Meta and other platforms lack incentive to promote extreme content because advertisers prefer to avoid such material.
This argument is transparently weak. While advertisers might prefer nontoxic environments, they prioritize user attention measured by screen time and engagement. For over 15 years, they have demonstrated—through the astronomical revenues generated by Meta, YouTube, and TikTok—willingness to tolerate socially damaging hatred as the price of documented user engagement. X's experience since Elon Musk's 2022 takeover offers a limit: as the platform became a trolling cesspool, it lost substantial corporate advertising revenue, though not all.
The Regulation Charade
Clegg portrays himself as a reform advocate championing government regulation. This claim rings hollow. Around the time Clegg joined Facebook in 2018, Congress—Republicans and Democrats alike—began fumbling efforts to rein in social media companies through legislation on transparency, content moderation, and antitrust. The following year, Meta and other Silicon Valley firms quietly began funding lobbying efforts under the "American Edge Project" banner, designed to appear as a grassroots movement opposing regulation in the name of patriotism. American Edge describes itself as "a coalition dedicated to the proposition that American innovators are an essential part of US economic health, national security and individual freedoms."
Clegg's book omits any mention of American Edge. Instead, he offers portentous but empty declarations: "If the masters of Silicon Valley refuse to open up, the choice will be taken out of their hands."
He speaks favorably of the 2023 Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, a worthy but unsuccessful bill that would have required social media companies to share more data with the public and researchers. The premise was sound: forcing disclosure of currently secret information about algorithms, content moderation, and advertising systems would give politicians and regulators a factual basis for substantive reforms.
Clegg ambiguously implies endorsement but sidesteps an obvious question: during his tenure, why didn't Meta unilaterally make these disclosures and pressure competitors to follow suit, rather than lobby against regulation?
Instead, he offers more specious rhetoric: "Journalists and activists will continue to keep the pressure up on companies like Meta to be even more transparent and accountable, and rightly so. But any meaningful scrutiny of Meta's policies and practices will find a company that is doing far more to keep bad content from spreading across its services than it is obliged to." This conveniently ignores that Meta faces no obligations precisely because of its deceptive pressure campaign against Congress.
Clegg cites Meta's occasional provision of data to outside researchers as evidence of transparency. This is deeply misleading. Throughout Clegg's tenure as a top Zuckerberg lieutenant, the company restricted transparency and undermined outsiders' ability to assess social media's effects on users and society. Meta provided researchers with faulty data omitting vast user populations, aggressively shut down an NYU project that exposed embarrassing truths about its political advertising and misinformation policies, and killed CrowdTangle, a tool academics, civil society advocates, and journalists used to track distortions on its platforms.
Teen Mental Health: Knowing Better, Doing Nothing
On adolescent social media harm, Clegg resurrects familiar Meta talking points to argue that the simultaneous rise in social media use and decline in teen mental health during the 2010s reflects mere correlation, not causation. Academic debate on this topic remains vigorous. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Clegg's former NYU colleague, makes the case for direct causation in his bestselling book The Anxious Generation, while critics argue the data are more ambiguous than Haidt suggests.
Clegg criticizes Haidt's methodology but embraces several of his main remedies: restricting phone access in schools, imposing stricter age limits on social media, and encouraging in-person play and screen-free interaction among children. "We all—parents, companies, governments, and individuals—have a responsibility to the young and vulnerable in our societies," Clegg writes.
Yet if he held this responsibility, why didn't he act when positioned to do so? Consider the impact had Meta loudly endorsed these remedies and challenged competitors to follow.
Inside Meta, employees have long worried about platform effects on young people. A brief filed by Tennessee's attorney general in litigation against Meta revealed a 2019 company-commissioned study on teenage mental health. Researchers warned that "[teens] are hooked despite how it makes them feel … Instagram is addictive, and time-spend on the platform is having a negative impact on mental health." They concluded: "Instagram is the worst platform for mental health."
A New Mexico attorney general brief exposed that in August 2021, Clegg himself forwarded an employee email to Zuckerberg requesting more resources for teen mental health. Clegg annotated it, noting the matter was "increasingly urgent" and that concerns about "the impact of our products on young people's mental health" were mounting. He observed the company's "well-being work is both understaffed and fragmented." This impression never surfaces in Clegg's new book. Zuckerberg apparently did not respond to Clegg's plea. (Haidt cites these attorney general brief excerpts in his own Guardian review of Clegg's book, a piece well worth reading in full.)
Superficial on Everything Else
Clegg addresses additional topics in How to Save the Internet, including artificial intelligence's future and preventing internet fragmentation globally. These discussions are superficial, trite, or both. He proposes a "digital democracies alliance" to prevent internet balkanization through conflicting national regulatory schemes. Yet he never explains why companies that have undermined far less ambitious rules would embrace such an effort, or how the United States—now led by a xenophobic autocrat seemingly intent on dismantling existing democratic alliances—would play the role Clegg imagines in forging new global collaboration.
The book fails to achieve its stated objectives. That Nick Clegg, of all people, would inflict it on readers represents a new benchmark for Silicon Valley arrogance.
Source: Tech Policy Press
