Mark Zuckerberg’s control of Facebook is unlikely to reduce
PremiumThe promotion of Nick Clegg is not likely to make much difference
Facebook, recently renamed Meta Platforms Inc, has always been good at telling a story. It was after whistle-blower and former employee Haugen Frances revealed the astonishing harm caused by the company’s products to the mental health of teenagers and others across the world that Facebook changed its name and got everyone talking about the metaverse instead.
Now Facebook’s chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has announced that his top policy executive, Nick Clegg, is being promoted and taking over the tough job of navigating an upcoming legal and regulatory minefield. So we now have this new story out there: Zuckerberg may be relinquishing control and allowing Meta Platforms Inc to be steered by a sophisticated public-policy savant.
But this announcement means the social media company is actually doing two things. Yes, it is handing off much of Zuckerberg’s responsibility around policy, relieving him of uncomfortable duties like answering to lawmakers and allowing him to focus on building and monetizing the immersive world he wants us all to one day inhabit (the metaverse). Zuckerberg has grown noticeably tired of apologizing for Facebook’s noxious side effects and has spent much of the past year in his Hawaii compound. He publicly ignored the whistle-blower’s disclosures for weeks on end, letting Clegg take all those slings and arrows that came Facebook’s way.
It also creates an illusion that someone else might take a different line on the company’s policy. Why else give another senior executive more sway? “We need a senior leader at the level of myself," Zuckerberg wrote of Clegg’s promotion in a Facebook post last week.
Clegg was already the most senior policy official at Facebook. He will now go from reporting to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, to reporting to both Sandberg and Zuckerberg. But Clegg was already in the room with both; so this isn’t so much a step up in the power structure as a slight shift closer to the person who is really in the driver’s seat.
While the founders of other successful technology companies like Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc and Uber Technologies have stepped aside, the person who founded Facebook around 18 years ago still controls 58% of voting shares and remains the company’s chairman. Shareholder attempts to curb that tight grip have failed, thanks to a loyal board of directors. Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants, including Clegg, display that same kind of loyalty. Although Clegg did play a key part in setting up Facebook’s Oversight Board, whose effectiveness is still to be proven, it’s hard to see him using his newfound position to take the company in a healthier direction with regulators by hashing it out with Zuckerberg. That is certainly not how many political historians remember Clegg’s relationship with Britain’s former Prime Minister David Cameron, for whom he arguably acted more like a ‘sidekick’ than a coalition partner.
What’s really troubling for Meta is that in order to make a success of the metaverse, Zuckerberg will need to roll up his sleeves and dive deeply into the public policy work that he loathes. Already one of the most pressing new issues he is facing revolves around policy and human behaviour: There have been several alleged incidents of harassment of women on Meta’s social metaverse platform Horizon Venues, including an incident of virtual groping and one of alleged virtual gang rape.
Microsoft has already given a masterclass on how to respond: last Wednesday, it announced a series of measures to address harassment on its own metaverse platforms, completely shutting down three of its main social virtual-reality (VR) apps, including a popular zone for meeting up and playing games with strangers called Campfire. Microsoft is reportedly also turning on safety bubbles for all its virtual reality visitors by default, boosting online moderation and automatically muting anyone who attends an event.
Facebook’s efforts to address metaverse safety look tepid in comparison. Following the reports of harassment, it introduced an option to block avatars from coming within a two-foot radius of a user’s own avatar. Blocking tools certainly hold promise, but they have been put under trial in gaming and can be misused as a blockade against others. A much more serious attempt at establishing safety as a norm would be to shut down Meta’s social VR platforms—as Microsoft did—and then redesign them with safety in mind.
But it seems very unlikely that Nick Clegg will push for big reforms like that. So long as Zuckerberg maintains his current level of control over the social media firm he’s led for nearly two decades, we can expect the status quo to continue.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.
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