It sounds insane but Nick Clegg, the onetime deputy prime minister of the UK, now head of Facebook’s public affairs, appears to hold the future of US democracy in is hands.

As you will recall, Facebook’s advisory board just upheld the decision to suspend Donald Trump from Facebook, following the attacks from a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol building on January 6 this year.

Already banned from Twitter, the decision to suspend Donald Trump from Facebook was not trivial.  Without Facebook and Twitter, Donald Trump’s ability to build support for his on-gong campaign to overturn the legal 2020 US election is significantly weakened.

According to Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager in 2020 and digital director in 2016,  “Facebook was the highway which his car drove on.” The power of Mr. Trump’s pronouncements on social media had been their ability to ricochet quickly across the web and into the streams of his supporters — something far harder to achieve while being de-platformed.

Without Facebook and Twitter Trump will also find it much harder to raise money and wield influence over the Republican party. He won’t have access to Facebook to help the candidates he wants to support in the primaries in 2022.

Put more simply, Donald Trump’s ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election, undermine and ultimately destroy US democracy will be impeded by this decision.

But there is a twist in the tale. In the 12,000 word judgement it issued, the  London-based oversight board said Facebook could not ban Trump indefinitely – it must find a permanent solution on its own, effectively kicking a final decision back to Facebook’s executives about whether to ban Trump for life or let him back on the platform in the future.

The person who Facebook said would lead that decision-making process? Nick Clegg.

Even Tony Blair admits Mr Clegg finds himself in an interesting spot: “He is part of one of the most powerful companies in the world at a moment of enormous change in the world, and when technology is at the heart of that change.”

Choose wisely Nick.

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