Just a few weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in for his second term, Meta is shaking up its global affairs team — a crucial body overseeing things like content policy, elections, and its independent oversight board.
Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister of Britain and chief of Global Affairs since 2018, announced he would be leaving the company in the new year, replaced by fellow exec Joel Kaplan as president of Meta’s Global Affairs team. Before joining Facebook in 2011, Kaplan worked in Republican politics, notably in the office of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and as deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush.
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In a post on his personal Facebook account and later X, Clegg wrote: “My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector,” he wrote. “I am simply thrilled that my deputy, Joel Kaplan, will now become Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer… He is quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time!”
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During his time as Vice President of U.S. Public Policy and later Global Public Policy at Facebook, Kaplan was accused of not remaining politically neutral and placating Republican figures with lax content rules, which the company has denied. Kaplan also controversially attended the Senate hearings on sexual assault allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Big Tech’s leading figures have been courting Trump’s favor over the last year and in the wake of his presidential campaign win, signaling a desire to get in the leader’s (and his tech-connected allies’) good graces despite previous conflicts. In particular, Trump has railed against Meta for its contested moderation policies and has accused the platform, among others, of engaging in a systematic campaign to silence himself and his supporters and skew election results.
In 2021, Trump was suspended from Meta platforms for two years, following his incitement of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. The company brought back his account in 2023 on a limited, provisional basis and then fully reinstated his profiles in July 2024, ahead of the U.S. presidential race. Since then, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has sidled up to Trump, including a $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund after he was spotted at the President’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Other tech CEOs have voiced their support for the Trump administration, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Meanwhile, Trump has pledged some of his biggest tech allies, including Elon Musk, political access.
