Search for Clegg Facebook ‘spies’
Leak inquiry into mole suspected of feeding secrets to former Deputy PM who’s now tech giant’s global supremo
NICK CLEGG is at the centre of a Whitehall leak inquiry after Ministers raised concerns that he was receiving secret information about Government plans to regulate Facebook.
The former Deputy Prime Minister has just been promoted to president of global affairs at the £400billion tech giant, where he will lobby against tough new regulations that could affect its business.
But Whitehall officials fear he is being fed sensitive details about what is being planned and have launched a major hunt to track down the suspected mole.
Sources say the alarm was raised when Sir Nick cited classified information in a Zoom call with Government officials as long ago as June 2020.
Fears were exacerbated last week when a newspaper article mentioned a ‘tech industry executive who has seen the proposals’ about regulation – which should only have been circulated among a handful of senior aides. Officials fear Sir Nick – whose salary is believed to have risen to £15million a year following his promotion last week – has retained a Government contact from his time as Deputy Prime Minister which has allowed the flow of classified information.
However, a spokesman for Facebook – now called
‘We don’t know if Clegg is getting info or if there are other sources’
Meta – last night said it was ‘absurd and false’ that Sir Nick had sought information from officials.
The hunt for the Whitehall mole will span the Treasury, Foreign Office and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. A security source said: ‘We don’t know if Clegg himself is getting this information, or the company has other sources, but they seem to know what we are up to almost before we do.’
Facebook faces legislation on a number of fronts, including tax, responsibility for content, and whether it should pay media organisations for using news stories.
Potential reforms were in confidential letters called ‘write-rounds’ passed between a handful of Ministers’ officials as they draw up agreements on action to take.
The source said that concerns were first expressed after Sir Nick cited information from such a confidential letter in his Zoom call.
But the leak probe was only triggered last week following a story in the Financial Times about the Online Safety Bill, which aims to clamp down on harmful content on digital platforms. The article quoted a tech executive ‘who has seen the proposals’ – even though they were contained in another restricted ministerial write-round.
Sir Nick, who joined Facebook in 2018, was promoted on Wednesday to president of global affairs at Meta, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and the virtual reality headset maker Oculus. Company founder Mark Zuckerberg said Sir Nick would become a ‘senior leader at the level of myself’, with responsibility for ‘all policy matters’.
The former Liberal Democrat leader, who was Deputy PM in
David Cameron’s Coalition Government, lives with wife Miriam and their three sons in a £7million faux Queen Anne house in Atherton, a Silicon Valley town known as ‘the most expensive postcode in America’. The new Online Safety Bill will require internet firms to seek out and remove ‘illegal content and [legal] content which is harmful to children’. Critics worry the move – which puts more liability on social media firms to police their content – could lead to severe restrictions
on freedom of expression. It is feared Silicon Valley corporations will err on the side of removing content on sensitive topics rather than considering the nuance of what is said and who is saying it.
The Financial Times story which triggered the leak probe said any requirement for tech giants – and smaller companies hosting usergenerated content such as travel review sites – to take extra responsibility for what was posted on their platforms would be a ‘huge red line’ for the industry, in the words of the unnamed executive.
However, a source at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said that the claims were a ‘garbled’ version of the writeround, and insisted that ‘publishers’ exemptions’ would protect freedom of expression.
Separately, the Government is planning to force tech giants to pay media outlets for using their stories,
‘Insinuations about Sir Nick are absurd and false’
if such deals cannot be directly negotiated. The proposals, based on an Australian system, address fears tech companies are dominating online advertising to the detriment of consumers and businesses.
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is pushing No10 to include the legislation in the next Queen’s Speech, arguing that struggling regional papers would benefit in particular from the boost to their revenues.
In 2020, the most recent year for which records are available, Facebook’s UK arm paid £36.8million on £190million of profits – a rate of 19 per cent. Globally, according to the Fair Tax Foundation, the firm paid just $16.8 billion in income taxes on revenues of $328 billion in the last decade, equivalent to 5 per cent.
A Meta spokesman said: ‘Any insinuation or suggestion that due to Nick Clegg’s previous role in Government he is now seeking or soliciting documents from officials is absurd and false. We are not aware of any inquiry into this issue by the Government and that is a matter for them. As for the alleged content of a Zoom call in June 2020, we have no idea what this is specifically referring to.’