Nick Clegg (pictured), former president of global affairs at Meta Platforms, warned technology companies should stay out of political arenas and cautioned everyone should feel uneasy about them intervening in the public realm.

In addition to his stint at Meta, which ended earlier this year, Clegg is also a former UK politician who served as deputy prime minister of the country.

“As the only ex-politician in an executive position in that company, in Silicon Valley, I was always advocating that it’s good for these companies to keep a certain distance from politics,” Clegg said during a TV interview today on CNBC. “I generally don’t think that politics and tech innovation mixes very well.

“I think it’s quite good when they keep each other at a certain respectful distance.”

US President Donald Trump has mixed politics with the technology sector by taking a 10 per cent equity stake in Intel last month.

In addition, Trump also brokered an agreement with China to carve out TikTok from parent company ByteDance by signing an executive order to create a new entity majority-controlled by US investors but his administration provided scant details.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported the Trump administration will collect a multibillion-dollar fee from investors for brokering the agreement.

Bloomberg reported yesterday (26 September) ByteDance is expected to receive licencing revenue from making its algorithm available to TikTok US, along with a share of the profit in proportion to its 19.9 per cent equity stake.

Jury is out
Clegg said the jury is still out on the TikTok arrangement because details have not been released by the Trump administration or Chinese officials.

He said there are several areas of concern. The first is whether data generated by TikTok users in the US is kept safe and not subject to surveillance in China.

“And leasing an algorithm, which is what I read is the idea,” he said. “I genuinely just don’t know what leasing an algorithm means.”

Under the proposed framework, Oracle, in addition to being a stakeholder, will oversee retraining ByteDance’s algorithm on US data.

“It’s quite difficult to sort of share an algorithm,” Clegg said. “The engineering that goes behind TikTok’s algorithm, all invented and designed in China, is a highly sophisticated thing to do.”