Page 10, lines 26 and 27 say the names are Nick Clegg, Nicola Mendelsohn, and Cristian Perrella.
To be clear, this is a motion from OnlyFans lawyers, and they're trying to communicate that the anonymous tip should not be considered reliable information. Not even the plaintiffs are claiming to have evidence of a demand to go with the bribe. But I expect it should be enough to subpoena the financial records that could prove that the information is true.
> alleged Meta employees added their accounts and others linked to OnlyFans competitors to databases used by companies internationally to identify malware and accounts linked to terrorism.
If this is true, I'd guess the situation might not only include issues of bribery, a quasi-public platform silencing speech, interfering with commerce, etc.
It sounds like it might include abusing/compromising/eroding mechanisms intended for protecting people against violent attacks, as well as other aspects of national security.
This seems like clear defamation. Facebook told lies about their users to other organizations which resulted in financial losses. Of course, IANAL, but it's super fucked.
>> it might include abusing/compromising/eroding mechanisms intended for protecting people against violent attacks, as well as other aspects of national security.
Just need to point the obvious out that being 'accused of' accepting a bride is not the same as the crime. Too many people commenting are taking the bribe accusation to be true.
Wanting to exclude evidence about it is not a good look - I get why a company would make use of every defense available to them and avoid taking a position on anything, but when you've got a judge pointing out that you really ought to know whether you were bribing people and most companies would deny that straight up...
A database of people who have access to databases, cross-referenced with a database of people who have abused database access, only accessible by the most rigorous of procedures, etc, etc. should solve this.
Sure, $10 billion seems like a lot to stand up two postgres containers, but can you really put a price tag on something like this?
So far, the evidence is that there is no way, because all those ways would rely on fallible human systems. The best one can do is live a good, ethical life, protect one's family, and try to find peace as best as one can.
I would never judge someone for valuing themselves or someone they care about over someone they don't, ethically that's fine in my books. In many cases though it's not beneficial for society for people to act this way and this is why we have some laws whose purpose is basically to break prisoner's dilemmas.
To put it another way, if you don't have reason to believe someone would collaborate in a prisoner's dilemma I would not say you are morally obligated to collaborate. You should and you are a better person for doing so, but it is not unethical to make the selfish choice in my opinion.
It's not unethical to be selfish huh and in your book it's ethical. Your sole justification for this is that you can't be sure the other person would collaborate.
Doesn't that mean you would only help people if you got something in return?
Asking what I would do and what is ethical will give you different answers in many cases. I'm not saying you should be selfish, simply that it is not immoral. If the only choice you are allowed to make to be a moral person is to take the most altruistic path then nearly every person on earth is immoral since they aren't using everything spare at hand to save people who are starving or dying of cold, etc.
Moral questions go beyond selfish or not, to the point that I'm not sure it's even a useful categorization.
Killing anyone who slightly inconveniences me is selfish, and so is keeping my last dollar instead of giving it to the poor, but those two have vastly different moral implications under and system of morality that's any good.
Relying on consumer boycotts to address anti-social behavior from companies that literally rely on addiction behaviors to get people to return to their product is clearly not the answer.
This is the exact purpose of the state, to punish bad actors that can't be effectively effectively punished or disincentivised with collective action.
You may have much more faith in US regulatory agencies and government than me.
Does knowingly participating in a corrupt platform or business make one complicit? This is why I opted out. If more people would make decisions with conscience, it would starve the beast.
Facebook has to hire well-connected former politicians and operatives, basically to bribe them, and these then take bribes from others as well. But what is facebook supposed to do here? Hire these people and not give them any responsibility, thereby making it a transparent bribe?
That is the fun part. OnlyFans is doing to Facebook what Facebook is doing to governments. The fact that the same person is involved in both really puts the point on it.
As for what they could have done instead, they could have gone the more traditional route and hired him as a consultant who attends a few offsite gatherings and maybe writes a policy memo for them if he’s feeling ambitious.
Meta has scrutinized the email, too, noting supposed inconsistencies in the plaintiffs’ claims, including that Clegg started at Meta after the OnlyFans bribery conspiracy allegedly started. In the court filing, Fenix also pointed out that plaintiffs have accused Perrella, but in their complaint, plaintiffs say that wire transfers allegedly sent to Perrella were sent to someone with a similar name at “Cristian Peralta Trust.”
You use their name and an email that looks almost identical to the original persons. Or when wiring, change the spelling or name on your account (create a trust where you have wide latitude on naming that mimics the other persons name). Look at the details of the OF episode that was on here a few days ago.
If Onlyfans claim his name was only released as a mistake, does that mean this trial could have happened with nobody new learning that Clegg allegedly accepted a bribe? How does that make sense? Was he only supposed to face internal punishment for accepting a bribe? As if that's the case, his promotion in February is pretty sketchy.
Wait, so you give people vast powers of controlling speech and gatekeeping access, with virtually no control, review or oversight, and turn out they abuse those powers for personal gain? That's a huge surprise, nothing we know about human behavior suggested that might happen!
I don't think that's what they're claiming at all. I think what they're claiming is that it's far easier for individuals to be corrupt if their CEO is similarly corrupt, which is a completely different claim.
Neither Meta nor Onlyfans are government organizations, they are privately owned and as such can make whatever deals they like. Calling a deal a "bribe" is just silly.
OnlyFans star says she REPEATEDLY tracked down Meta employees and had sex with them to get her Instagram account reactivated when it was locked for explicit content - and reveals Insta's shadowy 'review' process
The founder said it himself almost two decades ago: "you can be unethical while still being legal. That's how I live my life." He was telling the truth!
It definitely seems very believable given the founders and where FB/Meta ended up eventually. My view is simply that even if the slander is believable, I don't wish to perpetuate it if it's simply not true. (Yes, I realize the irony).
Meta employees are people too in the end. I can think of plenty of men who would cut ethical corners for a chance to hook up with a porn star. Just self-interested humans being self-interested humans.
Interesting how over time society is finding the decisions these massive companies make are arbitrary, and usually follow the scent of money - and not to "connect the world together".
They also certainly aren't hurrying to allow corruption. That goes against company interests. One thing is keeping arbitrary decision power for the company, entirely another thing is allowing your managers to wield it in your name and however they want. I bet you Facebook doesn't want any of the latter.
It’s not in Facebook’s shareholders’ interest. That’s all we can say.
Concentrated, opaque and arbitrary power centres are predictably corruptible. Creating and nurturing those at multiple levels of an organisation, one whose senior leadership has shown a pathological history of lying moreover, speaks to an unsaid intent, or at the very least, overt tolerance of the pattern of behaviour. It’s also self reinforcing, as the culture increasingly forgets how to build and protect other power structures.
> They also certainly aren't hurrying to allow corruption. That goes against company interests.
I suspect that corruption might actually help facebook avoid a bunch of negative attention from powerful individuals who’d otherwise struggle to get their account unbanned/verified/whatever.
The problem is that there is no "company" that has a will or ability to think or act on it's interests - the "company" is literally a virtual creation.
What DOES exist are a collection of people in executive positions. Some of them may take a long view and see that what is good for the company and stakeholders is good for them, and act on those ideas. But, sadly, what usually seems to happen is that the system actively filters into executive positions sociopathic individuals who will happily game the system for whatever advantage they can gain, and they're usually smart enough to not do it in the easier-to-catch direct bribery/kickback schemes. But, if they think they won't get caught, many will do so.
>>I bet you Facebook doesn't want any of the latter.
Again, there is no "Facebook" who doesn't want the latter. There is Zuckerberg, with primary controlling interest, who wants what he wants, and the board and a bunch of executives. And he can exert some level of control, including the threat to summarily fire them upon his displeasure. That will not prevent any of them bending the organization to their own benefit if they think they can get away with it, and nothing says in advance that they won't try something corrupt if they think they can get away with it (& nothing says they're right or wrong about thinking they can get away with it either).
Not even a major/primary/only shareholder can just do whatever they want. There definitely is a strong separation between Zuckerberg and the company. Even if he had 100% the company still would have to act fiscally responsibly for itself. Read the law.
>>Not even a major/primary/only shareholder can just do whatever they want.
Of course not. I did not say or imply that they could. I was merely clarifying that there is no abstract "company" with a will of its own, and that the major players, WITHIN the constraints of the law and the other players, can and often do exploit power for their own purposes rather than an abstract ideal.
>>There definitely is a strong separation between Zuckerberg and the company. Even if he had 100% the company still would have to act fiscally responsibly for itself.
Yes, people can have multiple hats, and there are laws about fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. There are often lawsuits over failures to uphold such responsibilities.
>>Read the law.
Yes, I do read the law. I do not make the silly assumption, as you apparently do, that just because there is a law, it fully covers all possible wrongdoing and people always follow it.
There are nearly unlimited actions that can be legitimately dual-purpose, benefiting the corporation and the individual executive/board member, whoever. and that does not even begin to account for the actions that are only arguably beneficial to the corporation but really extract value for the wrongdoer. I've literally heard an executive state "There's 1000 ways to screw minority shareholders", and watched them do it. There's a practice that screws creditors that is so common there's a name for it - a "cram-down". I could go on endlessly.
If you really think that the fact that laws define responsibility of corporate players, and therefore there is no wrongdoing, I'd like to talk to you about an opportunity for some great oceanfront property in Kansas. Sheesh.
What is Facebook if not the people leading it? These people are high up in the organisation, and according to OP other people at other levels are also doing this on purpose. Perhaps personifying a huge company isn't the right way to go.
Pretty big jump from "I have no moral qualms with advertising" to "I am actively seeking to manipulate people into providing sexual favors to my coworkers"
Says something about a persons moral fibre if they take a bribe - but dont deliever said thing they were bribed to do. That kind of lack of character does not align with our values.
The shifting of personal responsibility from the individual to the governments and corporations that exist to 'serve you' in some sort of hybridized federal/corporate merger.
When the majority learns from birth to completely trust the institutions (ran by the government) that have existed for decades/centuries before them, there's very little wiggle room to try and convince people that maybe they don't have your best interests in mind...
We'll see what happens when first-world governments can't reliably feed a majority of their citizens and when social media companies start putting "misinformation" tags on individual messages/status updates about people dying due to starvation.
The man who got his party to government off the back of promising to abolish tuition fees, then immediately tripled tuition fees landing an entire generation with massive debt has questionable character. Who’d’ve thunk it?
As a junior part of a coalition, they could only get through a few policies. The media put a lot of focus on tuition fees, but they weren't high up the Lib Dem agenda (e.g. the first mention in their manifesto[0] was on page 33).
In contrast, the Lib Dems did manage to pass same-sex marriage (frustratingly, many seem to credit the Tories or Cameron for this despite a majority of Tories voting against it at both readings[1]).
The Lib Dems also managed to block the Digital Economy Bill, AKA the "Snoopers Charter" (the Tories later passed it, once they got a majority in parliament).
The Lib Dem's top priority has always been voting reform, and Clegg seemed to gamble away far too much in an attempt to get it. All they managed was a referendum on a watered-down AV system (AFAIK the Lib Dems want STV, as used by Northern Ireland); which was heavily campaigned against by both Labour and Tories, and failed spectacularly :(
I would accept not being able to abolish tuition fees, but having a three-line whip imposed to vote to increase them after making a "personal pledge"? No, that was definitely wrong. The Lib Dem party should have revolted at that point and fees should have been left at their level.
Agreeing to a referendum on the voting system without securing agreement that the Tories would not campaign against it was also incredibly tactically stupid.
The coalition negotiations were far too quick and cheap. It should have been over a few weeks rather than a couple of days. Anyway, the public punished the Lib Dems by re-relegating them to minor party status.
> I would accept not being able to abolish tuition fees, but having a three-line whip imposed to vote to increase them after making a "personal pledge"?
This was key for me that turned it from being the unfortunate reality of politics into a serious breach of trust. I remember saying at the time that I'd have accepted keeping fees but tripling them was like slapping your voters in the face.
I understand they were stitched up by the Tories: the budget gutted university funding, meaning the choice was increase fees or watch higher education collapse. That being said, they needed to find another way.
From a strategic perspective, too, it was the biggest cause of their 2015 annihilation. Their entire message of "we'll moderate the Tories" had the ready response of "you mean like tuition fees?"
I always assumed that the LDs planned to stay in coalition for a few years, then exit over some point of principle, restoring their reputation as an independent party. Failing to do that seems like a clear mistake on their part, in hindsight. A lot of things could have been different now if they had made that move in 2014 or so.
Maybe with hindsight, but their main policy was/is electoral reform which would end up with more coalitions. They needed to prove coalitions can work. Funnily enough, I'd argue they managed to do that after seeing the governments FPTP has given us since the 2015 election.
It might not have been high up in their agenda, but it was still there and every single Lib Dem MP signed the Vote for Students pledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_for_Students_pledge) in support of it. So no matter what the outcome was, generations of students have incurred fairly ridiculous levels of debt as a result and many hold the Lib Dems responsible and feel betrayed. They may have been powerless to stop it, or they may have been ineffective - but the damage is done either way
It might not have been high up their agenda, but it was high up their campaign material and was a major reason why they won so many seats. It's also worth noting that they positioned themselves to left of Labour in that election campaign, and that as "kingmakers" they had the option of forming a coalition with Labour which would have allowed them to have gotten a lot more of their manifesto passed.
I am 100% not a fan of the LibTory years, but LabTory would have been a minority government. At the very least this would have been difficult to pull off.
>In contrast, the Lib Dems did manage to pass same-sex marriage
It's my pet peeve when people claim this.
The UK already had same sex marriage, it was just not called marriage. Labour brought that in. The bill you refer to just renamed it, plus it gave religious orgs a get out from equalities legislation and tidied up non-same-sex marriage rules.
And the only reason it passed was because of Labour. The majority of Tories voted against their own parties bill. And 10% of Lib dems did too.
Like so many of Clegg's achievements, it was a triumph of (false and misleading) advertising over substance...
In exchange for not supporting a bill that didn't really do what was claimed, the tories got total support for all of their economic and social policies.
> The UK already had same sex marriage, it was just not called marriage.
Sure, but marriage isn't just about legals/financials. Socially/culturally, civil partnerships are a "runner up prize" compared to marriage; e.g. the recent extension of civil partnership to opposite-sex couples didn't get much fanfare.
In any case, I was specifically referring to the 2013 act, rather than the broader notion of marriage/partnerships/etc. It's the inconsistency which frustrates me, to see people thanking Cameron/Tories for delivering same-sex marriage (i.e. the 2013 act) in one breath, and blaming Clegg/LibDems for delivering tuition rises in the next.
> And the only reason it passed was because of Labour
Absolutely. The LibDems couldn't do much to swing votes themselves; hence the back-room negotiations, whips, etc.
> And 10% of Lib dems did too.
True, but that's still just 4 MPs; so I'm not sure it's too statistically insightful. Still disappointing considering the whole point of liberal philosophy is personal freedom (unfortunately some like to interpret "personal" as "the corporation I own/represent", and "freedom" to include freedom to pollute, freedom to choose my own health & safety levels, etc.)
> In exchange for not supporting a bill that didn't really do what was claimed, the tories got total support for all of their economic and social policies.
To be clear, the bill which did that would be the AV referendum (which LibDems most cared about). Also, some Tory policies were blocked by the LibDems, e.g. the Digital Economy Bill.
I also used to argue that it was unfair to criticise the Lib Dems too harshly over tuition fees, because they hadn't won the election, and as the junior partner in a coalition obviously had to compromise on parts of their manifesto. Reasonable people could perhaps disagree on how hard they should have negotiated with the Conservatives on that point.
Then someone pointed out to me the tuition fee thing wasn't just a manifesto policy. Every Lib Dem candidate in that election had (at the direction of the campaigns department) signed a personal pledge to vote against a rise in tuition fees during the next parliament. Most of them broke that pledge in pretty spectacular fashion (at the direction of party leadership).
I didn't really have an answer to that, and still don't.
> The media put a lot of focus on tuition fees, but they weren't high up the Lib Dem agenda
Lib Dems target students and young people who are generally more liberal, their main selling point to them was tuition fees. Young people got them to government and they immediately turned on their voters.
I think the Lib Dems rapidly found the difference between being in permanent opposition and being able to promise what they like, and being in government where hard choices need to be made.
It was a coalition, though, and whatever he betrayed for that, you could argue he might have prevented the Tories from running an even worse government than they did during those years. Given what's happened afterwards, the evidence would be on your side.
For all that, I think he made a serious mistake going into coalition with the Tories when he could equally well (going on election results) have done so with Labour (plus possibly SNP I forget), whose policies I thought should have better aligned with Lib Dem.
But I'm assuming the best of intent here, and will continue to do so until proven otherwise, so this case is an interesting development.
From what I remember due to the figures if he'd gone with Labour it would have been a massively rainbow coalition. I think he got conned by the superior sliming skills of some of the tories and saw a bit of power, then messed up. He went all out to try for proportional representation giving up all other policies and then the tories were able to market that as looking so bad or just uninteresting that the majority either didn't understand the vote or didn't care, so it lost.
Clegg voted for raising tuition fees, in direct contradiction to the pledges. It was a betrayal and one that's on public record.
Cameron was a disaster. Austerity was incredibly cruel on the poorest of the population, and the UK wasn't exactly a shining light in its recovery from the financial crisis. He led a weak remain campaign and then stepped aside as soon as Brexit became difficult, and the following governments have had to deal with his mess, the covid outbreak and the effects of the war in Ukraine.
So I think you could equally say that the coalition is a root cause of many of the issues of today. That and the lack of any credible opposition for years.
> Cameron was a disaster. Austerity was incredibly cruel on the poorest of the population, and the UK wasn't exactly a shining light in its recovery from the financial crisis.
Although austerity did indeed start under the coalition (so it has the Lib Dems' fingerprints on it), didn't much of what many dislike about Cameron's premiership stem from after the end of the coalition?
> He led a weak remain campaign and then stepped aside as soon as Brexit became difficult, and the following governments have had to deal with his mess
He was rumoured to have campaigned in the 2015 general election on the assumption he'd renew the coalition with the Lib Dems, who would block the EU referendum he'd promised his voters, and who he could continue using as a human shield. But the backlash against the Lib Dems after just one term of coalition with him was so severe that he had to lead a single-party majority government and uphold his negotiating position as if it were a plan for government.
There were not the numbers of MPs to be able to form a coalition with Labour, a better solution could have been to just support the Tories with a confidence and supply [1] agreement.
I get the impression Clegg was concerned about any Prime Minister (whether put in place by a coalition, by a confidence and supply deal, or as head of a minority government) calling an early election just as soon as polls indicated it would be to their advantage. Partisan elections being a zero-sum game, that would be to the disadvantage of other parties, likely disproportionately including the junior party of any deal. This was before the Fixed-Term Parliament Act, and some of Clegg's energy, attention and political capital went into that act, rather than into electoral reform, tuition fees, etc.
Nick Clegg is a former Liberal Democrat who became deputy Prime Minister in a coalition with the Conservative Party in 2010. Following this, his Liberal Democrat party lost 49 of its 57 seats at the next election. He subsequently got a job with Facebook.
Oh, it's the same Nick Clegg? Do you have any idea why he didn't insist on a new electoral system when he had the chance, even if it meant sacrificing everything else?
He did insist! The country had a referendum after he got in. It was one of the main pre-conditions for the
coalition.
He did sacrifice everything because of that too! (Ref lost, low if not the lowest ever turnout, party lost huge support generally and he exited politics failed)
never mind, took a bit of googling, but I found some info on it.[0]
Christ that's in bad taste.
EDIT: wanted to add this quote from [1]: "On 5 May, David Blunkett, one of the Labour Party former-government ministers who had supported the 'No' campaign, admitted that the £250 million figure used by the 'No' campaign had been fabricated, and that the 'No' campaign had knowingly lied about the figure and other claims during the campaign."
So it does seem like it was a testing ground for the brexit busses. Just make a bunch of stuff up.
My question has been answered, but somehow I cannot find a way to feel satisfied. Rather… oh god no, say it's not true, please say it's not true and yes I do realise it's true.
Well, he lost his parliamentary seat in 2017, post-referendum, and there were no new UK commissioners created after that (Julian King was appointed in 2016 and was the final one.)
He's probably paid a great deal more as Facebook VP and has a less stressful job which doesn't involve dealing with the press or public nearly as much. Looks like an ascent to me.
Most of the comments in this thread relate to LibDems rolling over on university tuition fees. Are there any focussed on the actual topic which is Clegg accepting a Bribe?
The actual topic is his name being attached to a claim that OnlyFans bribed him (and others at Facebook).
It doesn't really add up to me, but I don't know how these high level bribes work in practice. I would have thought big business would have a smoother routine worked out than transferring money to accounts in people names.
But I find it odd that the perfectly reasonable claim by Meta, "why are you suing us if it was OnlyFans who bribed our employees to do something that benefits OnlyFans but not us" gets spun as being further proof that Meta was up to something.
I'm happy to believe Meta are up to something scummy but this all feels a bit random.
Meta has Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others.
When Meta tells law enforcement that user xxxBobTerrorist69xxx is a terrorist based on information they have from their apps, law enforcement listens. They can also ban that person from all of their platforms. These platforms are used by content creators for findability, just like any business.
If the only place you can advertise is your own platform, how are you going to draw people to your platform.
The plaintiffs are arguing that OnlyFans used connections to Meta executives to then have them use their position to lock creators on competing platforms out of important advertising platforms.
So far, it seems like Meta itself isn't the issue here, it's people who work for Meta. Which is a little hair-splitty considering some of the people involved. But if Rob Walton is caught snorting coke off of a hooker's ass, we don't say "WalMart" is doing it.
It appears that the mods have compiled several threads on the topic into a single HN post, merging comments below ArsTechnica and Gizmodo (and possibly other) articles on the same topics, which confuses some of the discussion. Yes, there are some which are focused on the actual topic - note that it's an anonymous tip alleging a bribe as part of a lawsuit, not irrefutable proof/actual confession/final conviction.
Ha, a generation of English students will thoroughly enjoy this. For a bit of context, he was the head of the Liberal Democrat party in the UK which gained a lot of popularity among younger voters leading up to the 2010 UK General Election. This was in no small part due to a pledge they all made to not increase University tuition fees.
They were fancied to do very well in that election - Clegg was young, spoke really well and outclassed everyone in pre-election debates[0]. However they didn't do quite as well as hoped - while they added about a million votes over the previous election, they ended up losing a few seats in total. However they ended up in a fairly powerful position, since neither of the two bigger parties - Labour and the Conservatives - had enough MPs to form a majority government. So whoever could form a coalition with Lib Dems could basically win.
They chose to enter a coalition with the Conservatives who then proceeded to lifted the cap on tuition fees and basically every university in England and Wales promptly hiked their fees to the maximum allowed. In response they didn't do much other than wring their hands and offer meek apologies. The party was quite understandably crucified at the next election, losing 49 of their 57 seats and they've been the fourth party - behind the Conservatives, Labour, and the Scottish National Party[1] - ever since.
[0] - This was a pretty low bar, though. For example one of the memorable parts of the first debate was that during his closing statement he namechecked the audience members (name, location and issue) who asked the candidates questions. The media liked this. Needless to say, all the candidates did the same in the second debate :D
[1] - They do pull more votes overall than the SNP, but due to how the UK system works they don't get as many parliamentary seats. Understandably they pushed for a proportional representation voting system which would help ... but that failed.
> This was a pretty low bar, though. For example one of the memorable parts of the first debate was that during his closing statement he namechecked the audience members (name, location and issue) who asked the candidates questions. The media liked this. Needless to say, all the candidates did the same in the second debate :D
It always shocked me that this was what the media jumped on, and seemed to matter most to people. Really shows how appallingly low the standard of political debate and reporting has become.
(Personally, I'd be much happier with someone who didn't spend time on such obvious PR guff, and was a good and incorruptible administrator of a country.)
I still don’t know why we have them. It seems to make elections even more about personalities and individuals than politics.
It’s amazing how many people when presented with a list of policies will vote one way, but when presented with a list of names and parties will vote the other.
British universities were pushing hard for the raised tuition fees at the time, a legacy of Labour's drive to drastically increase the numbers of people going. They claimed that they were going broke and needed the possibility of charging more to decrease class sizes and scale up their operations. They also claimed that very few universities would actually raise prices to the new cap, that in most cases the new prices would be hardly different.
The coalition, both Tories and Lib Dems, were completely suckered by this claim. They came to see raising the price cap as an unpleasant compromise, needed in order to ensure education remained high quality at the very highest end (russell group etc). What actually happened next showed that the claims of universities were a lie: every university immediately raised their prices to the max and faced with a tidal wave of new money, the academics that had been claiming they needed it to benefit students immediately went on "strike", except it was the sort of strike where they continued to turn up and do research (the fun bits), but refused to mark students exams. In other words they held students hostage at the start of their careers. I remember because I was there at the time.
Because the university sector has pathetically weak management this tactic worked very well, and within months the "strike" was ended by the simple expedient of allocating nearly all the new money to wage increases for lecturers and other academic staff. The new money was swallowed whole by the existing system, the big promised expansion never happened.
The ironic thing is that universities are heavily biased towards Labour/Lib Dem voting, with university towns being much more orange than typical, even though it was the Tories who gave them all massive pay rises and Clegg who notionally opposed it.
> faced with a tidal wave of new money, the academics that had been claiming they needed it to benefit students immediately went on "strike"
> the "strike" was ended by the simple expedient of allocating nearly all the new money to wage increases for lecturers
This makes it sound like the money from tuition fee rises went to the academics as pay. It didn't: they've now had real terms pay cuts for over a decade (here's one estimate [1]), as well as their pensions becoming worse.
The tripling of the price cap occurred in 2010; there was a strike in 2013 because university staff had had a real-terms pay cut of 13% in the 4 years from 2008-2013 [2].
It would also be more accurate to say that universities and vice-chancellors (rather than "academics") pushed for a raise in fees.
"The tripling of the price cap occurred in 2010; there was a strike in 2013 because university staff had had a real-terms pay cut of 13% in the 4 years from 2008-2013 [2]."
You're right, I'm mis-remembering the ordering of events. The strike I'm talking about was in 2006 and pre-dated the tripling of the fee cap. They got a ~15% increase for everyone in the entire sector, including non-academic staff. Then they started to plead poverty and demanding a rise in the price cap, even as the great recession was ravaging the economy.
I do seem to have recalled correctly that they claimed at the time very few universities would actually raise prices.
Your university source picks the time period for their "pay cut in real terms" starting immediately after they got a big pay rise phased in over two years. I learned at the time that the way unions calculate things like cost of living and "real terms" isn't always what you'd expect, though this was coming up on 20 years ago so I forgot the exact details of what they were doing. At least back then it wasn't just inflation. I do remember being pretty disgusted at their strike tactics and especially at the fact that universities continued to pay them, even as they refused to do their jobs.
> Then they started to plead poverty and demanding a rise in the price cap
It would be fair to say that academics demanded increases to their salaries (to limit how far they fell below inflation), but not that they demanded tuition fees be increased to achieve this.
See this policy briefing from the UCU on "Tuition fees in higher education" from May 2010 [1]: whilst bodies representing the universities supported increases in fees, the position of the UCU union (representing the academics, rather than the universities) was that tuition fees should be abolished and replaced by a Business Education Tax:
> University and College Union has consistently opposed the payment of tuition fees. Rather than charge students for their education, UCU would charge large employers who benefit from the plentiful supply of graduates through a new Business Education Tax (BET).
It's really not the case that lecturers wanted to stuff their pockets by price-gouging their students.
> They also claimed that very few universities would actually raise prices to the new cap
Yeah I remember this too - the commonly-held belief was that only the top Universities (Oxbridge, Durham, LSE and UCL, plus Edinburgh/St Andrews for English students) who would max it out, and that the rest might just allow themselves a little bit more to balance the books. Looking back it seems pretty obvious that it wouldn't go down like this - who wouldn't want to give themselves more money?
I didn't recall all the details of the aftermath though (the strike + the capitulation) though, that was a pretty interesting turn. I guess it was after 2011 when I moved abroad.
.. although that's to a great extent international students, because their fees aren't capped at all. Higher education is one of the UK's successful export industries.
> Ha, a generation of English students will thoroughly enjoy this.
They might well do, but it was their parents that didn't stop them and say 'perhaps you ought to get a job, do an apprenticeship, or basically anything other than a BA in Madonna Studies and 70k in debt by the time you're 21'.
This is another political legacy of Blair trying to get every kid through university and has resulted in pointless degrees and an increasing percentage of the population in debt. And can't afford to get on the house ladder.
You're deliberately using frivolous, made-up degree to try to dismiss the point. No matter, let's pretend someone doesn't have a "BA in Madonna Studies" and they have a degree you might respect more, like a BEng in Civil Engineering. Do you think they should have 70k in student loan debt that (with the UK's famously awful salaries) they'll be paying for over a decade? Of course they shouldn't. Hell, even less well-off European countries like Czech Republic manage to offer tuition-free higher education under the age of 25 - I don't see why non-Scots UK students shouldn't at least have more affordable tuition.
I'd also add that in the UK student loan debt is orthogonal to the problem of young people being unable to get onto the housing ladder. Remember that Scottish students do not incur the same level of student debt (on account of the government paying tuition) and they have similar troubles buying property. Salaries and house prices control this, student loans barely figure into it.
What part of going to university aged 18 to get a junk degree, just because that's what's expected, and tens of thousands of pounds of debt by the time you're 21 is absurd, is wrong? In the UK in 2022, if you're not inclined to do a STEM or professional degree, you're probably better off going into a trade or apprenticeship.
> I'd also add that in the UK student loan debt is orthogonal to the problem of young people being unable to get onto the housing ladder.
Perhaps you'd like to tell that to one of my kids that has to factor all their outgoings (including university debt) into their calculations which tells them exactly whether they can afford to take on mortgage?
Civil Engineering is a junk degree!? I was going to say Architecture but I thought CivEng was playing it safe. Wow. Ok so can I take another punt - Mechanical Engineering? Is that worthy?
I'm really puzzled by your second part, so you have kids who have sufficient deposit saved up, and a high-enough salary to qualify for a suitably-sized mortgage ... but the difference between their current rent and the would-be mortgage repayments is high enough that specifically their student debt repayments are stopping them?
That's an incredibly unique problem. I mean, as someone who is probably within a few years of your kids' age, the overwhelming problems in our age groups are the deposit and the price itself beyond beyond what a bank would lend based on salary. Everyone I know who is struggling to get onto the ladder is facing these two problems. I was lucky with where I bought and more importantly when I bought (on the eve of a 3x price boom) otherwise I might have hit the same issues.
Well, they're perfectly sane from the point of view of supply and demand. Boomers have pulled up the housing ladder behind them by blocking anything from being built.
Not hugely positive, but I had some sympathy for him once upon a time: I suspect he was a well-meaning but not especially strong leader of his party, who went into the coalition with mostly good intent. Once there, mind, I'm not sure why he didn't fight harder, and he lost all of the goodwill he'd built up during the election campaign through some of the policies that the coalition enacted.
I appreciate he'll have made an absolute boatload of money, but going to Facebook seemed a very odd choice. Or maybe he judged that his public profile couldn't be saved, and cashing in in the US was his best option?
Agree with this. The Lib Dems had an existential crisis at that time (2010) as Labour and the Conservatives were both fighting for the centre ground and it seemed that would become the norm (deeply ironic given Corbyn, Brexit and Truss later).
So Clegg rolled the dice on getting proportional representation rather than first past the post to solve this and lost. He also had a go at being less of an opposition party (where you oppose) and more of a coalition party like in Europe to get things done (post the financial crisis). This failed.
Everyone hates him for tuition fees, but apparently George Osborne told him to vote against the huge raise. Had this happened I doubt people would remember him with the malice they do.
Finally, he always seemed an ethical person (Lib Dems usually are excepting local election shenanigans), so the charges seem odd and out of character, but so did the move to facebook.
> apparently George Osborne told him to vote against
Ha, the Conservative coaching the Lib Dem how to be a Lib Dem. That's a good friend.
As others have commented, opposition parties have to oppose.
Further, #1 job of party leader is to build the party. Especially for an upstart. That playbook includes symbolic defeats. To show everyone what you stand for.
> So Clegg rolled the dice on getting proportional representation rather than first past the post to solve this and lost.
Clegg compromised on a referendum on the "Alternative Vote" (i.e. what Americans call "Instant Run-off Voting" and Australians call "Majority Preferential Voting"). Alternative Vote isn't proportional or even semi-proportional. I think he considered it a worthwhile compromise:
1) on the grounds that it's a form of Single Transferable Vote (which also has proportional forms), and
2) on the assumption it would increase votes for smaller parties and hinder the major parties from forming governments in the face of opposition by a majority of voters (the received wisdom being that there was a block of like-minded centrist and left-of-centre voters that was inefficiently divided between Labour, the Lib Dems and others, to the advantage of the Conservatives - but Clegg's deal took place after more than a decade of Labour's votes having unusually been the most efficient, and Clegg was considered part of the Lib Dems' "Orange Book" faction which was less friendly to Labour and the left than Lib Dems typically are).
Why odd? He falls as Deputy PM of 67m in the disUnited Kingdom, takes a payrise and more importantly rises to be Deputy Emperor of ~3bn in the World Wide Wall.
Odd because I would have thought he'd be able to see how badly working for Facebook would ultimately reflect on him, and I would have thought he'd have more pride in his image. I'd have expected to see him pop up in some well-meaning public role that could lead to some image rehabilitation, rather than doubling down.
But as said, maybe he judged that his image was already beyond repair, so at least he could get rich instead.
In terms of personality he seemed pretty decent and professional.
Perhaps it's just rose-tinted lenses, but as every year advances, the current crop of politicians in all parties just seem to be worse, and more childish than the previous lot. And that's a hard act to follow. Yet here we are.
Yes, I had several issues with Blair, Brown and Cameron for different reasons, but it seems like both parties have produced a strikingly poor crop of leaders ever since that generation holding the 'centre ground'.
The people - espeicially those complaining about university fees - went to the polls and firmly rejected the "centre ground" and any compromise from their political parties. Leaders since have pandered every more to their membership and their base with the message that their way is the one true way and anything else would be a disaster or treason and the other side are enemies of the people.
He lead a party that won 62 of 650 seats and was able to enact 95% of the parties policies.
Cameron and Osbonre skillfully used their junior partners to take the blame for everything unpopular while claiming credit for every good idea. The unintended consequence was to wipe out the lib dems which in turn killed off any centerism in UK politics.
I think it speaks volumes about the average lib dem voter that because the purity test of 100% was not achieved despite coming 3rd in a 3 horse race it was deemed to be a disaster. Without a doubt I expect every single one of them would prefer the government they voted out to the successive governments that have come and gone since.
I'd bet that there would be more Clegg supporters here than in most places. The Liberals are basically EuroTories, and Clegg the version of Blair that had a Dutch mother. Sort of the perfect social liberal fiscal conservative paneuropean.
edit: He also sold out his professed ideals for personal financial success, so he makes other people feel better for also doing that.
> Out of curiosity though, does anybody here have a positive take on Nick Clegg?
Clegg is as close you’ll find to a neutral politician. He doesn’t seek to do good, nor does he seek to do evil. He is simply out to increase his own power, and apparently wealth too.
Yes he plunged an entire generation of students into debt, but he didn’t do so maliciously. They were simply in the way.
hi hello yes i was told these databases were only going to be used for Stopping The Terrorists™, Saving The Children™, and/or Stopping The Spread™
a bunch of surveillance state simps in a comments section called me naïve and said it's against the law to use a product in a manner other than directed, so this could never possibly happen
nobody ever could have predicted this [specific series of events and actors]
i guess this is what they mean by a black swan event
Can you clarify? From the article it sounds like this is some kind of “blacklist” database (sort of like a “known spammers” list) that is somehow is used in the industry to deny traffic to certain domains. Is it a government database?
Edit: It sounds like these databases are owned/maintained by Meta:
> If anything, plaintiffs allege that these John Does went rogue by manipulating and corrupting automated processes and databases that Meta had established for purposes of combating terrorism, deploying those methods to attack competitors of an adult-entertainment company, and then ‘attempt[ing] to cover their tracks’ to ensure Meta could not learn of their aberrant behavior,” Meta’s motion says.
Meta further argued that, even if true, any decisions to penalize OnlyFans’ competitors would have been protected by the company’s First Amendment rights, and the limited liability protections offered by Section 320 of the Communications Decency Act
It's GIFCT [0], a database of perceptual content hashes shared between FAANG's for cooperative moderation. It's largely a response to FAANG's PR crisis after several of the live-streaming terrorists. It's a self-regulating industry group and not administered by any government.
(Also misspelled "JFCT" in some of the court transcripts from this case).
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
I hope Mark Zuckerberg has reflected on how much he has changed over the decades. He originally wanted to build a social network, borne out of a 4chan style sense of 'fuck the man' and do cool things that improve the world. But instead, he's created a vehicle to harm the world--to take from the poor, and to give to the McKinsey alums who've infected and ruined his business for their own personal gain. He could have done it the right way, but he chose to let them do this to his company. What was even the point of burning Eduardo or the Winklevosses if he just in turn handed the keys over to even shittier people?
> borne out of a 4chan style sense of 'fuck the man' and do cool things that improve the world
Has zuckerberg ever been subversive? I thought he started facebook out of horniness and desire for power, and that pretty seamlessly morphed into greed and lust for more power.
I think Facemash was quintessentially 4chan style fuck-the-man. He hacked every Harvard house directory to make some highly offensive web tool. What he did to the Winkelvoss jocks certainly had an element of not wanting to play ball with the aristocracy.
This is an oddly generous characterization of Zuckerberg, probably borne out of the optimism of the era when the networks were getting started. Keep in mind that this is the same person who called people who handed over their data to him as dumb fucks. A person who models their life around Augustus is most definitely not a fuck the man type of person. Besides, being a Harvard student is not exactly a rebellious choice to begin with. There is no circumstancial evidence to paint him as a subversive and plenty that paints him as the opposite, but I suppose we'd have to know him a bit better to understand him properly.
Why do you think he was hard done by on the student fee issue?
* In his manifesto he said he'd scrap tuition fees.
* He signed a _personal_ pledge against voting to raise them.[0]
* People voted for him with this information.
* He was able to gain power through a coalition government.
* He voted to _raise_ tuition fees.
You can see how people could feel betrayed by him[1]. I wouldn't say he was hard done by, and I think condemnation of that behaviour is a rational response.
[1] ...the percentage of students supporting the Liberal Democrats had fallen from 42% at the last general election to 11% just after the vote on fees. 83% of students said they felt let down by the Lib Dem leadership's decision
That's fair enough, and if he'd said "we can't stop this, I'm sorry" and _not_ voted for it himself, it would have been fine. That's not what happened, he personally voted to raise the fees, and he instituted a 3 line whip for his party to do the same.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23131224-76-main#doc...
Page 10, lines 26 and 27 say the names are Nick Clegg, Nicola Mendelsohn, and Cristian Perrella.
To be clear, this is a motion from OnlyFans lawyers, and they're trying to communicate that the anonymous tip should not be considered reliable information. Not even the plaintiffs are claiming to have evidence of a demand to go with the bribe. But I expect it should be enough to subpoena the financial records that could prove that the information is true.