Silicon Valley including Meta has embraced Maga politics, says Nick Clegg | Nick Clegg
Former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said Silicon Valley companies, including Meta, had decided to adopt Maga policies, some for “more self-interested” reasons.
Clegg, who spent nearly seven years at Meta as head of global business, told The Rest is Money podcast that when he left the company in March 2025, three months after the start of the second Trump administration, he felt like “it was a very good time for me to move on.”
Rulers who had previously stayed away from politics turned to the right; The products themselves “have completely changed: from being human-focused to being more about content, often with synthetic ingredients, algorithmically recommended to you,” Clegg said.
He also questioned the UK’s contract with US software company Palantir, expressing his dislike of the US spyware firm’s ideology and saying there were legitimate concerns about “whether Palantir has made itself too clingy” (instilling dependency on its customers).
Palantir’s contracts with the UK have been the subject of increasing controversy in recent months. last week one report of the parliamentary committee on science, innovation and technology He said Palantir was “the most alarming example of the public sector’s growing dependence on a small number of large technology providers.”
The committee called on the government to terminate its contract with Palantir in 2027 if permitted under the contract’s termination clause.
The day after the report, former health secretary Wes Streeting described Palantir executives as “Blofeld’s bad guys” at an event at the SXSW conference in London but defended Palantir’s handling of UK health data and refused to say whether the contract should end.
A Palantir spokesperson said: “We’re proud that our software has helped deliver better care, including an additional 110,000 operations to date, a 15% reduction in discharge delays and a 7% increase in the number of people finding out they have cancer within 28 days. As the former foreign secretary himself said, this is ‘absolutely critical to the future of the NHS’ and there aren’t many platforms and providers in the world that can do this.”
Clegg suggested that with the rise of AI, Palantir could easily be “disrupted or challenged” by AI-powered competitors and perhaps be replaced by one of them.
While Palantir touts its AI capabilities, its core offerings are software platforms that integrate data into business and government workflows. These now use AI, but Palantir hasn’t built its own underlying AI models.
Louis Mosley, managing director of Palantir UK, told the Today program last week: “The UK government used us in two departments that have since stopped using us and have had no problem transferring the data, logic and intellectual property they developed in our software from our software to other vendors. So the idea that we are part of vendor lock-in is false.”
Clegg’s tenure at the heart of the US tech industry began in 2018, when he was hired as a lobbyist for Meta after his predecessor Elliot Schrage resigned amid the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Clegg managed the fallout from this scandal during his time at Meta and created a body to oversee Meta’s content moderation decisions.
He came to Meta shortly after the departure of Sarah Wynn-Williams, Meta’s former director of public policy, who later wrote the whistleblower account Careless People about her time at the company. Here he describes Meta executives’ blundering, myopic and “fatally careless” decision-making, including allegations that they worked with the Chinese Communist Party on censorship, and alleges cases of sexual harassment by some of the company’s executives.
Wynn-Williams performed at the Hay festival but was forced to remain silent due to legal action taken against her by Meta; this secured an emergency legal order preventing him from publicly discussing aspects of the book on the eve of publication.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment. He previously described Careless People as “a mix of outdated and previously reported allegations about the company and false accusations about our executives.”
