When Britain’s former deputy PM took a job at Meta, nothing could have prepared him for the ‘cloying conformity’ of the tech world.So why does he still think social media is a force for good? Read an exclusive extract from Nick Clegg’s new book hereThe rain is just starting to fall from a grey London sky as Sir Nick Clegg arrives, ducking through the traffic and carrying what looks like his laundry.Clean shirts for the photoshoot, he says, before apologetically wondering if he might possibly get a coffee.Within minutes he has further apologised for wanting to swap the leather club chair he is offered for a hard plastic one; and then, in horror, for any impression inadvertently given that my questions might send him to sleep.Impeccable English manners should never be mistaken for diffidence – at 58, Clegg remains the only British political figure who could convincingly be played by the equally posh but self-effacing Colin Firth, whose old London home Clegg recently bought – but there are backbench nobodies more grandly self-important than the former deputy prime minister who became number two at the tech giant Meta.

Which may be just as well, given rumours that his next supporting role may be to his lawyer wife Miriam González Durántez’s nascent political career in Spain.It turns out she “never really settled” in the land of the billionaire tech bro, one of many reasons the couple swapped poolside life in Palo Alto, California, for London almost three years before he left Meta, which owns and operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.“She’s fomenting insurrection in Spain now,” Clegg says of España Mejor, her non-profit aimed at bringing citizens into policymaking.It’s almost as if the marital tables have turned.“Yeah, well, she’d be a much better politician than I,” he laughs.

A week later, rumours surface that González Durántez might consider leading a new Spanish liberal party,If Clegg ever needed to fade gracefully into his wife’s political shadow, as Bill Clinton did for Hillary, I suspect he’d be comfortable with that,He has done 15 tough years on the frontline: first as the Liberal Democrat leader in a Conservative-led coalition government, often defending or apologising for the compromises that accompany power; followed by something not dissimilar but better paid as president of global affairs at Meta,Are reports that he earned £100m in salary and stock options over seven years in Silicon Valley true? “I’m sure they’re wrong, but I haven’t put the … ” He wriggles,“I was paid extremely well.

I feel extremely fortunate.”Either way, perhaps what his critics most want to know is whether he really was committed to the cause, or sold out to big tech for the money.“I’m afraid the truth is worse than they imagine,” he says genially.“I really do believe that, despite its imperfections, social media has allowed billions of people – especially billions of people who often cultural elites like us in the developed world don’t think about, across Africa, Latin America, Asia – to communicate with each other in a way that has never happened before.”So this great human experiment in bringing a billion people into each other’s homes was worth it? “Anything that empowers people to express themselves, I have a very visceral liberal view that is a good thing.

And all the evidence I’ve come across suggests the net effect is very positive.” It’s what comes next that concerns him.His new book, How to Save the Internet, warns of the dangers posed to a free and open global internet by an age of autocrats and a titanic power struggle over AI.Clegg announced his departure from Meta just weeks before all the tech titans – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, his own former boss Mark Zuckerberg – were photographed lining up obediently at Donald Trump’s inauguration.The timing was no coincidence: Clegg expected Trump to win, but hadn’t foreseen “quite the alacrity with which the whole of Silicon Valley was going to move from what it was when I moved there, which was wary of politics, to seeking to be joined at the hip with the new administration”.

Having long argued for Meta to stay out of politics, evidently that was Clegg’s red line.Still, he insists his exit was “very civilised”.He won’t criticise the measures announced days after he left – including replacing professional factcheckers on Facebook and Instagram with a Wikipedia-style system of users correcting misinformation, plus loosening the constraints around posting on hot topics such as immigration or gender – to reduce what Zuckerberg called “censorship mistakes”.A course correction, Clegg insists, was not illogical.“I think it was reasonable to say, particularly around the time of the pandemic, that we slightly overdid it.

Most of the time I was there, the pressure from government and, dare I say it, from papers like the Guardian, was always ‘take down’.”But did he agree with Zuckerberg telling the manosphere-friendly Joe Rogan podcast the same week that corporate life needed more “masculine energy”, and a culture that “celebrates the aggression a bit more”? There is a pause.“It’s not really me,” he says flatly.“I don’t really know what to say about that.” Well, he could just say what he thinks?“When I think about all the problems of society, I don’t think the one thing we need is more masculinity,” he begins slowly, then suddenly he’s off, at an increasingly indignant gallop.

“You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if you were immensely powerful and rich like Elon Musk and all these other tech bros and members of that podcast community, that you’d reflect on your good fortune compared with most other people?But here’s the interesting thing.” His tone grows more scathing.“In Silicon Valley, far from thinking they’re lucky, they think they’re hard done by, they’re victims.I couldn’t, and still can’t, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.”He insists he’s not directing any of this against Zuckerberg personally.

“And please don’t portray it as such – it is a cultural thing, from Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding stuff to any Silicon Valley podcast.If you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”It’s not the first time the concept of recognising your own privilege enters our conversation – Clegg jokes that returning to London helped avoid the youngest of their three sons, 16-year-old Miguel, growing up “a spoilt Silicon Valley brat” – but it seems the most heartfelt, for reasons perhaps rooted in his own childhood.Nick Clegg was born in Buckinghamshire, the third of four children of a half-English, half-Russian banker father and a Dutch mother who as a child survived internment and near-starvation in a brutal Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.Those early experiences left their mark: Clegg and his three siblings, though privately educated, were raised not to take their gilded lives for granted and never to waste food.

Of the three bubbles in which he admits to spending his working life – Brussels as an MEP, then Westminster as an MP and finally Silicon Valley – Clegg found Westminster “the most insufferable, partly just because of the living on past glories and the pomposity of it”,Charismatic and smart, he was tipped for the leadership before he even arrived in parliament in 2005,But even he seemed faintly disconcerted by Cleggmania, that feverish period in 2010 when voters unconvinced by Gordon Brown or David Cameron decided that they, too – in what became the catchphrase of the first-ever televised election debate – agreed with Nick,In hindsight, Cleggmania foreshadowed a much angrier strain of populist revolt against the mainstream to come,But it could not survive him joining Cameron in coalition.

The Lib Dems won battles – over free school lunches and tax cuts for the low-paid – but never recovered from having to defend benefit cuts and renege on their pledge to scrap tuition fees.After their crushing defeat in the 2015 election, Clegg could only watch from opposition as Cameron called and lost a Brexit referendum that still enrages him.(Whenever his former partner is mentioned, he noticeably stiffens: when I say I’d heard Cameron envied his fancy job and fresh start in California, his only response is a clipped, “I can’t comment on how other people feel.”) He is convinced Britain will rejoin the EU within his lifetime, and if he ever saw that debate resuming, “I’d drop everything – whether to stuff envelopes or man the barricades.”In 2017, Clegg lost his seat to an underwhelming Labour candidate later jailed for fraud.

But it wasn’t the worst thing to happen that year; in the autumn the couple disclosed that their then 15-year-old eldest son Antonio had undergone treatment for cancer.(Now thankfully recovered, Antonio and his younger brother Alberto have stayed in the US for university and work.) Coincidentally, that summer the family had holidayed in California to celebrate the end of Antonio’s chemotherapy, which meant when the then Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg approached Clegg about a job in 2018, “we could say to the boys, ‘Do you want to go back and live in the place we’ve just holidayed in?’”The idea of starting over in sunny, can-do California clearly beat “trying to relitigate the battles of the past” back home.Yet it meant leaping from the frying pan into the fire of a company accused of swinging the 2016 election for Trump, ruining teenagers’ mental health and failing to stop its platform in Myanmar being used to help incite violence against the Rohingya minority, in which thousands died and more than 700,000 fled.Clegg insists he wouldn’t have joined the company if he wasn’t convinced Facebook wanted to change.

But, crucially, he also has the unwavering commitment to free speech – even if what is said is offensive – of a liberal raised in pre-internet times.He fought pitched battles in government with then home secretary Theresa May over online state snooping, and is uncomfortable now to read of British police making 30 arrests a day for allegedly offensive social media posts.It clearly rankles that the case for free speech is argued loudest now not by liberals but by Reform leader Nigel Farage – who recently criticised the introduction of age verification on social media sites, meant to stop children seeing legal but harmful content such as pornography – and US vice-president JD Vance.“There is nothing I find more stomach-churning than the brazen hypocrisy of Trump administration members flying first-class over to Europe and pontificating about being the great defenders of free expression, when they then fly back to intimidate and bully their opponents,” Clegg says.It’s in the US, not Europe, he notes, that foreign students cleanse their social media feeds to avoid deportation.

Yet he warns that if crackdowns on so-called online harms – odious but not illegal material – become all-encompassing, they will be politically exploited,“The Farages of this world will get more of a hearing the more imprecise these boundaries are,”Despite his libertarian instincts, Silicon Valley was a culture shock,In an industry obsessed with Chinese rivals, Europe barely figured (the only British issue people asked about was Harry and Meghan, a subject he views with “shoulder-shrugging indifference”),And though his book is in parts very funny – Musk beaming into an AI summit via video link from his private jet like “a hostage video shot on the Death Star”; then culture secretary Nadine Dorries demanding he take down a controversial tweet, seemingly unaware Meta doesn’t own Twitter (now X) – Clegg soon learned not to make jokes at work, after one ice-breaker about not bringing your “authentic self” to the office elicited stony silence.

Though he loved exploring the great outdoors with his sons, he found Silicon Valley “cloyingly conformist”, despite its claims to radical disruption.“Everyone wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same podcasts, follows the same fads.It’s a place born of immense sort of herd-like behaviour.”Yet even as an outsider, Clegg still sees tech as a force for good.His book was conceived as a plea to preserve the open flow of information and money across borders, in a time of drawbridges being yanked up.

But it also confronts claims that social media has made us angrier, dumber and sadder, chiefly by arguing, in true centrist dad style, that it’s actually more complicated than that.“You don’t just switch your phone on, scroll, then suddenly something happens to your neural pathways to make you think and feel things you never did before.”The evidence linking social media use with children’s mental health is weaker than often suggested, he argues, with some troubled teenagers finding comfort online; but he acknowledges it’s not always the case for vulnerable people.In 2021 a whistleblower leaked internal Instagram research suggesting a worrying number of girls already struggling with issues such as body image reported that using social media made the difficult times worse.Clegg doesn’t disagree with calls for new age limits on children’s social media use.

“I cannot think of a better decision that should be taken by parliaments, not by tech bros.” He thinks 13- to 16-year-olds should have separate social media, with age restrictions enforced via app stores when children first set up their phones.Similarly he argues in the book that affective polarisation – hostility to people with different political views – started rising in the US before mass use of social media, and even fell in some countries as social media use increased.Does he think the sway it holds over politics now is more or less unhealthy than that wielded by old media kingpins such as Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre? “I think it’s way more unhealthy in the hands of people like Dacre because he’s famous for just kneecapping people he doesn’t like for political ends.No tech bro is going to do that, because the people who run the platforms, they don’t generate the content.

”Sign up to Inside SaturdayThe only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine.Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.after newsletter promotionHis arguments are made with the fluency of someone who has been delivering them professionally for years, and he’s right that cause and effect isn’t easily proven here.But is he really claiming social media has nothing to do with the rise of Trump, Reform or violent flashpoints such as last year’s Southport riots (partly fuelled by posts wrongly describing the killer as an illegal immigrant)?He does concede that virality is new and can, as seen in Myanmar, “create new perils.Does it mean the anger of the mob is invented by social media? Of course not.

Pol Pot, the 1930s, the pogroms – all of these things happened well before social media.”But if, as he argues, it wasn’t social media, then what did leave Britain so “knackered and sullen and out of puff”? Clegg blames the “near-death experience” of the 2008 banking crash, followed by what some would call his government’s crippling austerity measures, then Brexit and a “chronic wasted decade” of political paralysis.“I remember so vividly in 2015 thinking, oh, finally.People’s earnings started rising above prices in 2015 after years of this bone-crushing pressure on wages.And it literally flipped overnight in 2016.

”The one time he seems genuinely flustered is when asked about Careless People, a memoir by ex-Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams – who left the year before he joined – painting a picture of toxic tech bros out of control.Meta, which initially sought an injunction preventing the author promoting it, insists the book contains “defamatory and untrue allegations”.Wynn-Williams claims she was asked by Sandberg to join her in bed on board the corporate private jet.Did Clegg witness anything like that? “No.I haven’t read it for very good reasons.

You’ll have to ask her why she wrote it eight years after she left, I’m writing mine eight months after announcing leaving Meta,”But you needn’t have read it to answer the question? “They’re instances in time when I wasn’t there,I didn’t see any of that,”Wynn-Williams also accuses her boss, Joel Kaplan – later Clegg’s deputy, now his successor – of sexually harassing her,(Meta calls this “misleading and unfounded”, saying an internal investigation cleared Kaplan, and Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.

)“I don’t know anything about those subjects,” Clegg says.“Joel Kaplan was always an exceptionally decent, diligent, principled guy who worked with me, so I can’t give you a running commentary on a book I haven’t read about a person I don’t know at a time when I wasn’t even at the company.” Now he’s getting agitated: “If people want, ‘Oh, he’s left Facebook, he’s now going to condemn them’ – of course I’m not, that’s not what my book is about.It’s not how I feel, and even if that’s how I felt, I wouldn’t then write that book.“If I felt Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg were the monsters other people say they are, I don’t think I would ever have worked there … Are there things where I very strongly disagree with them? Are there mistakes they’ve made? You bet there are, many of which they’ve acknowledged.

But, you know, at the end of the day I arrived at that company convinced these were two people who recognised it needed to change dramatically and took me on to deliver the change.”The reforms he fought for included creating an independent oversight board to adjudicate big decisions, such as whether to suspend high-profile users, and commissioning independent research tracking the impact of various measures – banning political ads, or switching feeds to chronological rather than algorithmic order – on control groups of users during the 2020 election.“The wildly underwhelming conclusion was it makes almost no difference at all to how people actually vote.”He also introduced new parental controls, including the ability to limit children’s time on Instagram – though the Cleggs didn’t ration their own boys’ screen time.“We’ve always just talked to them a lot about what they are seeing – I’ll find out in 20 years if it’s done any good.

Thankfully I have football-obsessed boys, so they spend all their time looking at clips of the latest Messi goal.”When I ask about his toughest day at Meta, I’m half expecting something like the suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who had been viewing self-harm images on Instagram (the coroner ruled she died “while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content”).But, instead, he picks the “very, very uncomfortable” decision he took to suspend Trump from Facebook in 2021 for incendiary posts during the Capitol Hill riots.“I found that really weighed on me very heavily and still does because, on the one hand, I felt very clearly that the content rules of the company had been violated and, on the other hand … it’s an unelected private company making a decision that affects the public realm.And he was the outgoing president of the world’s most powerful democracy