Nick Clegg: ‘Data is not oil… you burn and it’s gone. Data is more like air, you can’t lock up air’

I think there are three regulatory planets that have a gravitational pull of their own. It’s India, the EU and the US. Maybe a few years ago, when the European Union took this lead with GDPR, there was a sort of feeling that the Europeans were leading on the regulatory debate. I think it’s changing quite quickly, not least because of what’s happening here and now, which is one of the reasons I’m in Delhi this week: you’ve got three big pillars of new legislation being drafted by the current Indian government — the Digital India Act, the Telecom Act, and the DPDP Bill (Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022), which is being revised and published.

We have two basic paradigms at the moment — we have a Chinese-style internet, which is closed off from the rest of the world, and then you have much of the rest of the world, which is based on a far higher level of openness. Within the non-Chinese paradigm, there are three regulatory forces that matter above everything else and that’s India, Europe and the US. I think the more India, the EU and the US can agree on some basic foundational principles, it will be a good thing in safeguarding the openness of the internet for future generations.

Anil Sasi: We are one year into the transition into the broader Metaverse push. There are speculations about what the triggers were for this. It is said that Facebook, some 10 years ago, was, perhaps, late in reacting to the shift that happened to mobile. The other more obvious reason that is cited is the need to compulsively move away from the social network because there was an element of regulatory scrutiny, a drop in younger users and increasing toxicity of content. Do either of these theories hold?

Neither do. It’s not the case that Facebook is shrinking. There are whole areas of growth we are incredibly excited about, many of which, by the way, we pioneer here in India. In the end, a tech company, in particular, has to be forward-looking. We have been investing billions of dollars into these augmented virtual-reality products for years. It’s just that no one noticed it until we made it more explicit. In many respects, by renaming the company Meta, we were making explicit that which was previously somewhat implicit.

Anil Sasi: As a former politician, which are the geographies where you find dealing with people in the regulatory space the toughest? How does India compare to the rest of the world?

There’s been this very striking backlash and pendulum swinging. You go back a few years, it’s almost naive to think, this assumption that communication technologies were only ever going to deliver beauty and goodness. There are bad people in the world who are going to do bad things as well and that shows up on our platforms. Then, you have this quite marked mood swing, a “techlash” against the technologies that were once lauded as the answer to all our problems. My view is that that pendulum will only come to rest when society feels that technology is there to serve society, not the other way around. My role in a sense is relatively simple — it’s to ensure that the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater, that the rules don’t suffocate the openness and freedom of expression that people value in the internet age. So some of the discussions I’ve had with ministers this week is just very practical stuff. I find policymakers here now to be pragmatic. If you look at the DPDP Bill, it’s a model of clarity and coherence…

I go to Indian policymakers and tell them if you’re going to introduce new rules, in our view, this is the best way to do them. They can agree or disagree. But we are not playing some tricksy game

Anant Goenka: I think fundamental to that was the data localisation. Do you find other countries also are kind of agreeing to what platforms would want in terms of not localising data? The big change between the last bill and this one is that they are easing the localisation of data.

I think there has been a real sea change. Data is not oil, it’s actually the opposite of oil. Oil is something you suck out of the ground, you burn, and it’s gone. Data is more like air and you can’t lock up air. There still is a major legal process going on between the European Union and the US about the legal underpinnings governing the data flows across the Atlantic. There is a very similar debate in parts of Europe about data sovereignty. You try to lock up your data, you’re only going to make yourself poorer.

Anant Goenka: This new light of reason that the Indian government is seeing over the last couple of years, how did that come to be? Was it industry pushing the government? How much support did you get from the US government in making that happen?

I think they did it because it’s right for India, not because they think it’s any good for Meta or the US government. Given India’s pre-eminence in the digital economy, it has a special interest in keeping that digital economy open because India can export ideas, products, apps and content for years to come.

Anant Goenka: Did you ever feel some platforms were coming to a situation where the government was saying, look, you have to move on this or we are out. Did it ever come to a take-it-or-leave-it scenario?

I’ll illustrate that point by pointing to a non-Indian example. We are very clear with our investors and with markets that if there are not open data flows between the EU and the US, we genuinely don’t know if we will be able to carry on providing our services in Europe. I get the impression that the pendulum swing is now maturing into something a lot more productive — now, we’re really getting into the business end of the granular judgements of where exactly you draw the line.

Raj Kamal Jha: You have often said that governments are a lot more powerful than Big Tech. But between politics and technology, which is a more reactive force? Facebook launched the ‘Like’ button in 2009 and 13 years later we are still discussing how to regulate Facebook. So, governments will always be playing catch-up… As a former politician, what do you think politics should do to shrink this lag?

Can politics move as fast as tech? The answer is no. But I think we can minimise the gap a lot and we should try to do that, because I don’t think it’s healthy that 13 years after the ‘Like’ button, we are talking about regulating social media today. It’s not healthy societally, it’s actually not good for us as a company, because those 13 years get filled with people yelling at us to come up with solutions that we can’t come up. Everybody agrees that if you want a thriving, competitive digital ecosystem, you need to enable people to move their data effortlessly from one service to the other, what’s called data portability. But the more you encourage data portability the more you incur risk to privacy. So, it’s a fundamental trade-off between competition and privacy, between data portability and data security. Those are foundationally political, philosophical questions that cannot and should not be answered by the private sector. One of the many things that I’m trying to do is to urge decision makers not to repeat this pattern again. It cannot be that once again the technology sector moves forward constructing this new computing platform of augmented virtual reality experiences, the so-called Metaverse, and 20 years later, finally the rule makers decide what the rules are on data portability, on data use, on eye-tracking, on integrity, on safety, on child- and age-gating.

Shyamal Majumdar: Is Meta working on eye tracking and does it raise privacy concerns? How do you counter this?

We have gone through extensive consultation with privacy experts to ensure, firstly, that users have control about when they switch these features on or off. Secondly, we are very clear that we’re not seeking to track or monitor involuntary eye movements, and so on… We’re not trying to scoop up data about intuitive subconscious reflexes… User control, minimising data storage on our own servers… these are the kinds of safeguards we’re putting in place.

Soumyarendra Barik:There has been quite a bit of reporting that Meta has taken certain content moderation decisions to favour the government. Does Meta consider political factors while making content moderation decisions in geographies like India?

It would be almost ludicrous, this idea that we would handpick different parties to favour at different times. None of that is to deny that on content, you are always going to have edge cases… the global prevalence of hate speech is about 0.02 per cent. I’d love to think we’ll get it down to zero but you’ll never get it to zero. But we are getting better and better. We’ve cut it by over 50 per cent through advances in AI.

Anant Goenka: Do you believe that there is a certain amount of reliance that you have on Indian policymakers, specifically, because a big part of your growth, or Meta’s business growth is in India?

I go to Indian policymakers and tell them if you’re going to introduce new rules, in our view, this is the best way to do them. They can then agree or disagree. But we’re not going to try and play some tricksy game. The sheer velocity and scale of our systems are such that the idea that we would try and conflate all of that and sort of curry favour here — I wouldn’t know how to do it, even if I wanted to do it.

Rishi Raj: The Indian government wants you to trace the origin of mischievous messages on WhatsApp. You differ saying it will break encryption. Second, WhatsApp’s new privacy policy enables sharing of business account data with Facebook. The Competition Commission of India sees it as abuse of dominant market power. The new Data Protection Bill mandates user consent for using data for purposes other than for which it was collected. Has there been any change in your stance? Or, has there been any discussion with the government since you have met the minister recently?

The traceability issue is sub-judice and I haven’t been following the CCI issue very closely. But on the underlying issues of principle we think having to fingerprint every message, so that you can somehow trace it back to its origin is not consistent with the security and privacy of people’s communication.
Similarly, we have no quibble at all with the idea of user consent. Of course, users should consent to the way their data is used. But from several years of experience, we realised that if you pepper users with endless consent notices, they become, in effect, meaningless. So, we have a view about what’s the best way to seek that consent in a way which is comprehensible to users.

Aakash Joshi: Mark Zuckerberg has often spoken of values of free speech, liberal democracy being central to Meta’s values. But how far do you find that you have to do ‘values localisation’? You are in multiple countries that do not share a democratic idea of free speech, for example.

Firstly, because we are a global platform, we try to be as open and consistent as possible, but that doesn’t mean that we are operating in some sort of inappropriate ideological West-Coast straitjacket. For instance, we have in our content standards, provisions about caste-related hate speech, which is entirely derived from the content we see in India and entirely inapplicable elsewhere.

…In countries which are much more fragile, we will often take precautionary measures where we might temporarily just reduce how quickly content circulates on our platform. And because we operate on issues like misinformation, you can’t possibly have one standard formula. That’s why we work with independent fact checkers in different countries separately. So, we work with more fact checkers in India than any other single country in the world, in 15 languages.

Nandagopal Rajan: As you start having conversations about regulating the Metaverse with governments, is it difficult because you are talking about something they are not used to? And are those conversations going to be easier compared to the ones you need to be having with other companies in the space, because essentially, the Metaverse as it is growing now, is coming up as different bubbles?

We, at Meta, are very keen to reach out to other companies so that we can grapple with these things together because if you don’t grapple with them together, instead of creating a wonderful open ecosystem in this new computing platform, we will all be in danger of spawning a sort of balkanized, fragmented Metaverse.

P Vaidyanthan Iyer: What has Metaverse done proactively in terms of opening up data to researchers, or allowing governments or regulators to audit some of its algorithms or features, or respond to demands of heightened content moderation?

The most powerful signals that our algorithms use to decide what you see before other stuff is who your friends and family are, what groups you are part of, and what content you have engaged with in the past. In fact, many of our algorithms are deliberately designed to suppress borderline content… misinformation, hate speech… On sharing data, we have given huge databases to about 11 universities in the US to study the behaviour of people on Facebook at the time of the 2020 presidential election… they will be publishing those results soon. We also independently sometimes share data with researchers for societal reasons. Professor Raj Chetty at Harvard recently published work on the relationship between the extent to which people from different economic backgrounds living in close proximity to each other leads or doesn’t lead to greater social mobility.

Raj Kamal Jha: Wearing your parent’s hat now…what is your social-media hygiene for your teenager?

I have three kids, ages 20, 18 and 13 years. So Miriam, and I, generally, have seen that the use of social media, the use of messaging apps, particularly during the pandemic, was hugely valuable to our children. Our children were able to maintain relationships with friends they didn’t see for up to two years. I have got no monopoly wisdom on being a good parent, but I think you have just got to talk to your kid the whole time, make sure that the channels of communication are really open… Then, of course, there are now a whole bunch of controls that you can use as a parent. On Instagram, including India, we have introduced a whole bunch of (such) controls.

Anant Goenka: We have been hearing about layoffs at Meta…

One thing that probably unites almost all companies is that — I don’t know if this was a collective misjudgment — I think there was an assumption that trends we saw in the pandemic would continue. In other words, the huge shift to online work, play and commerce was somehow a permanent step change. It turned out not to be the case. Speaking of Meta, we employed huge numbers of people as this explosion of online activity took place during the pandemic. We assumed that was going to continue.

But, of course, when that line goes like that, and we are hiring like that, you have to cut your cloth. You have to cut your cloth differently.

Why Nick Clegg

After almost two decades in British and European public life, Sir Nick Clegg, 55, president of global affairs, Meta, joined Facebook in 2018 in what is arguably one of the toughest policy job in the world. Before his current role, he worked in Brussels in the European Commission and then went on to become a member of the European Parliament. He was elected to the UK Parliament in 2005, where he held the position of spokesperson for Home Affairs. He became the leader of Liberal Democrats in 2007 and served in the capacity till 2015. Clegg also served as UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, during the tenure of David Cameron