Nick Clegg is at the centre of a Whitehall leak inquiry after Ministers raised concerns 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 £400 billion 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.
And 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.
Nick Clegg is at the centre of a Whitehall leak inquiry after Ministers raised concerns he was receiving secret information about Government plans to regulate Facebook
Officials fear Sir Nick – whose salary is believed to have risen to £15 million a year following his promotion last week – has retained a Government contact or contacts from his time as Deputy Prime Minister which has allowed the flow of classified information.
However a spokesman for Facebook – now called Meta – last night strongly denied he had sought information from officials, describing such claims as ‘absurd and false’.
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 is facing legislation on a number of fronts, including the tax it pays, the responsibility for the content it carries, and whether it should pay media organisations for using their news stories.
Potential reforms had been contained in confidential letters called ‘write-rounds’ which are passed between a handful of Ministers’ officials as they draw up agreements on what action they should take..
The source said that concerns were first expressed after Sir Nick cited information from such a confidential letter in his Zoom call of June 2020
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. Last night a spokesman for Meta said it was ‘not aware’ of any Government leak inquiry.
Sir Nick, who joined Facebook in 2018, was on Wednesday promoted to the powerful position of 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’ – leading him to be dubbed the ‘Master of the Metaverse’, the vitual reality future the company is hoping to build.
The former Liberal Democrat leader, who was Deputy PM in David Cameron’s Coalition Government, lives with his wife Miriam and their three sons in a £7 million faux house in Atherton, a Silicon Valley town known as ‘the most expensive postcode in America’.
The property boasts five bedrooms, six bathrooms, swimming pool, outdoor hot tub and ‘patio fireplace’. 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 content on their platforms – could lead to severe restrictions on freedom of expression.
It is feared Silicon Valley corporations will err too much on the side of removing content on sensitive topics rather than considering the nuance of what is said and the credentials of who is saying it.
For example, Facebook previously removed evidence that Covid may have originally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan – a theory which is finally being accepted as the most credible by experts.
The former Liberal Democrat leader, who was Deputy PM in David Cameron’s Coalition Government, lives with his wife Miriam and their three sons in a £7 million faux house in Atherton, a Silicon Valley town known as ‘the most expensive postcode in America’
The Financial Times story which triggered the leak probe said any requirement for tech giants – and smaller companies hosting user-generated content such as travel review sites – to take extra responsibilities 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 write-round, 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, 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 No 10 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 £36.8 million on £190 million of profits — a rate of 19 per cent. Globally, according to the Fair Tax Foundation, the firm paid just $16.8 billion income taxes on revenues of $328 billion in the last decade, equivalent to 5 per cent.
A Meta spokesperson 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 involving Nick Clegg in June 2020, we have no idea what this is specifically referring to and would need more substantiated detail to respond in full.’
