Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister, has recently been hired by Facebook (Photo:Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

In the past 12 months it’s become crystal clear that our rapidly digitising world poses a serious threat to Parliament and everything it represents. Our democracy is dangerously out of date, and unfit to defend itself from the growing power of corporations.

This August, Apple became the world’s first trillion dollar company – making its stock market value larger than the entire economies of Turkey and Switzerland. Big tech companies are building monopolies of unprecedented scale and scope – and their business models undermine our most fundamental rights and freedoms.

The likes of Google and Facebook compete for our dwindling attention spans to maximise profits from advertising. In return for access to these incredible ‘free’ tools for communication, research, navigation and so much more, we provide them with information that reveals our innermost thoughts, fears and desires.



And increasingly, that data allows them to disrupt our politics. Earlier this year we learned about how shady political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected 71 million Facebook profiles – including those of one million people in the UK – and used them to target people with highly personalised political advertising.


This manipulative micro-targeting plays on people’s individual fears. It also results in more and more of us believing that the distorted, subjective, fact free, online world with which we are presented is the truth.

With MPs and the public becoming increasingly concerned, the tech giants are going on the offensive and hiring people with connections to lobby hard against potential regulations.

One option is to treat Google, Facebook and Twitter like traditional broadcasters, which must comply with strict rules about political impartiality (Photo: Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Last month, former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg landed himself a job as Facebook’s head of global affairs and communications. Uber has snapped up former advisers to Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Labour’s Ed Balls. Google has hired at least three people with experience of advising prime ministers, and more with track records of assisting senior MPs. Between them, we’ve estimated, Google, Facebook and Amazon have around 50 people working to influence UK Government policy – and they’re advertising for more.

This is a deeply disturbing trend.

After what we’ve learned about how these tools can be used by political parties and even foreign agents to influence elections, we should be discussing how – not whether – to rein in these corporations.

One option is to treat Google, Facebook and Twitter like traditional broadcasters – which must comply with strict rules about political impartiality. Though anyone can post content on social media, these are not neutral platforms – their algorithms control which information we see.

We could decide they need a whole new set of standards – or even that they’re so huge and so integral to public life that they should be brought into public ownership – but we need to start that conversation now.

In the meantime, the Government’s priority must be to draft a Digital Bill of Rights asserting and protecting our rights as citizens, not consumers – and the right of ownership over our data.

It should establish that people must give genuine, informed consent for a corporation to collect their data – and no amount of small print should justify selling it on or using it for other purposes.

It should grant strong enforcement powers to an independent regulator. Fines of even a few million pounds are small change to the likes of Apple – there must be real consequences for mishandling our most personal information.

Next, ministers should introduce laws forcing political campaigns to be open about their funding – with a requirement that campaign spending is updated publically in real-time.

All online adverts must be made transparent – just like the political leaflets that land in your letterbox. A sentence at the bottom of every ad should tell us immediately who is targeting us. And we should be able to opt out with one click.



With tech giants becoming as powerful as nation states and building armies of political experts, we must be prepared to defend our democracy.

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