Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk could become a “political puppet master” in the US, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has said.
Clegg, who is now Mark Zuckerberg’s second-in-command at Meta, where he is the president for global affairs, made the comments to Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast.
When asked whether Musk was a threat to democracy, Clegg said the entrepreneur had been “playing an outsized role” in the US election and in the formation of the new Trump administration.
He also stood by comments labelling Meta’s social media rival, X, a “one-man, hyper-partisan, ideological hobbyhorse”.
The former Liberal Democrat leader, who served as deputy PM to David Cameron in 2010’s coalition government, swapped Westminster for Silicon Valley after losing his Sheffield Hallam seat to Labour in the 2017 general election.
In 2022, he was promoted to a senior role by Zuckerberg, with responsibility for policy as well as communication and a reported bonus of £10m on top of his £2.7m annual salary.
He has been the voice of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, on a range of highly controversial issues since then.
In his interview with Nick Robinson, he spoke about how his role was making judgements about how to balance freedom of expression with protecting audiences from harmful content on Meta.
In contrast, Musk has spoken of his mission to “remove all the censorship” from X, with Clegg saying “you can’t move [on X]… for want of tripping over stuff from the person who now privately owns it”.
When asked if Musk was “a threat to democracy”, Clegg said: “I think Elon Musk is obviously now playing an outsized role in both the election and now the formation of the new US administration.
“And I think it will see he has a choice – he can be either an avid and well-heeled supporter… Or he can try and become a sort of political…puppet master, going well beyond Trump, deciding who the next Republican candidate should be and the one after that, and so on, so forth.”
He added people were familiar with the former because “people with means” often get involved in politics, but the latter “is is quite different to the general tradition of American democracy”.
The former Lib Dem leader also highlighted the benefits of generative AI, mocking the idea the technology would “turn us all into paperclips by next Tuesday”.
He claimed fears that “AI was going to destroy democracy” were over-egged, particularly fears that democracy would “up-ended by AI deep fakes” in 2024, the year with the most elections around the world in history.
Although he conceded that didn’t mean there weren’t deep fakes or attempts to use AI to spread misinformation this year, he said “the dog that, broadly, has not barked is AI” and safeguards within the industry meant it wasn’t “the end of the world”.
He added “it has a paralysing effect when we talk about almost fictional fears” and urged a renewed focus on dealing with “real” issues around child sex abuse, deep fakes and disinformation.
Responding to criticism from campaigners and governments that Meta is not doing enough to tackle harmful content on its platforms, Clegg said: “I don’t think anyone’s ever doing enough.
“And I think this issue of how kids interact with the online world, how much they use smartphones, how they use social media apps is something that you should never, ever think that the job is done.”
