Why Big Tech should not play at politics
Prior to the start of the second Donald Trump presidency, former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, stepped down as Meta’s president of global affairs. During his seven years tenure at the social media giant, Clegg established the firm’s oversight board.
Soon after his appointment in January 2025, Clegg’s successor, Joel Kaplan, gave an interview to Fox and Friends, which effectively marked the end of fact-checking on Meta’s social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
At the time of his resignation Clegg said: “My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions, and norms affecting the sector.”
This is something he has continued to speak about and, to coincide with the recent South by SouthWest festival in London, Clegg discussed the politicisation of Silicon Valley with ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston.
Looking at how the tech bros, the CEOs of the big tech firm who all lined-up behind Donald Trump on January 20th 2025, for the inauguration, Clegg said: “About one half of the US thinks that companies like Meta actively censor and suppress their view of the world, and another half yell at them and say, ‘You’re not censoring enough to keep us safe’,” he said. “There’s a much more polarised debate, and I think if you’re dealing with something as sensitive as speech, and where speech moderation ends and free expression begins, it’s more sensible to refrain from jumping into one political camp or another.”
His view of the Silicon Valley bosses is that they all think there has been a “paradigm shift” in politics. And for better or worse, they are aligned with MAGA values. But these values are not compatible with how the tech sector has taken advantage of things like the H1-B visa scheme to hire the best tech people they can find, irrespective of their nationality. MAGA is also incompatible with their approach to using outsourcing to reduce cost and provide competencies and production scale they are unable to source locally.
Clegg believes this alignment puts them in a perilous position as the political pendulum eventually swings the other way. Even the UK government appears a little less enthusiastic about Big Tech. Kanishka Narayan, minister for artificial intelligence (AI) and online safety told delegates at the AI Summit in London that the UK rejects technological determinism in favour of agency: “The best AI tools in the world won’t be built behind closed doors by a handful of companies – they’ll be built by people who ship code, share it and let others make it better.”
Increasingly for tech buyers, geopolitics is more of a consideration than it was prior to January 2025.