Where the elephants go to die

I suppose this counts as a tweet, as I have yet to get much further than noticing that reference 1 exists. But it seems that our former Deputy Prime Minister, one Nicolas Clegg, aka Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg, children brought up as Catholics, has taken to the air as something called an avatar, which he and his employer Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook), seem to think is the appropriate format in which to go into bat. At least his former Prime Minister has the decency to lie low inside some boutique finance operation.

The story so far being that Zuckerberg and Sandberg (not to be confused with the respectable people at reference 3, most recently noticed at reference 4) have pushed him into the limelight to soak up the barrage of abuse. That's what they are paying him for.

Abuse for making a lot of money while doing a lot of damage to the world's information networks - damage which leaks into real damage to real people, not just to avatars and their bytes.

I might add that my present understanding is that Facebook do provide Internet access to all kinds of places and people, mostly in the tropics, which and who would not otherwise have access. Whether, on balance, this is a good thing is another matter.

My interest in all this being prompted, if not originated, by reference 2.

References

Reference 1: My trip into the metaverse with Facebook defender-in-chief Nick Clegg: The UK politician turned Meta exec on Mark Zuckerberg, the Haugen leaks and banning Trump – Henry Mance, FT – 2021.

Reference 2: Silicon Valley: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation: The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world – Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review – 2021.

Reference 3: https://www.sandberg.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/facts-not-opinions.html.