Meta will be starting off the new Trump term with a Republican head of global affairs, as the company looks to better align its operations around the new U.S. administration.
Today, current Meta global affairs chief Nick Clegg has announced that he is leaving the company, and will be replaced by his deputy Joel Kaplan.
Clegg, who at one time was the Deputy Prime Minister in the U.K., has played a key role in Meta’s government relations and negotiations over the past seven years, during a critical period in which the company came under intense political and regulatory pressure.
But now, Clegg is moving on to explore new opportunities.
As per Clegg:
“I will be forever grateful to Mark and Sheryl Sandberg for taking me on in the first place – and to the many colleagues and teams I have had the good luck to work with ever since. It truly has been an adventure of a lifetime. Having worked previously for close to two decades in European and British politics, it has been an extraordinary privilege to gain a front row insight into what makes Silicon Valley such an enduring hub of world leading innovation. The pace and scale of change has been as dizzying as it has been ambitious.”
Kaplan, who’ll be taking over the role, is a former chairman of the FCC, and also served as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff under George W. Bush.
He’s also, according to reports, long pushed for Meta to take a more hands off approach to political speech in its apps.
As per Semafor:
“[Kaplan] has been one of the most forceful voices inside Meta against restrictions on political speech, arguing internally that such policies would disproportionately mute conservative voices.”
Semafor further notes that Meta also recently appointed another Republican, Kevin Martin, to the role of vice president of global public policy, while its general counsel, Jennifer Newstead, was a top legal adviser to the Trump State Department back in 2017.
The re-alignment will see Meta better placed to work with the incoming Trump team, as it looks to minimize disruption to its various operations, and maximize opportunity through its evolving projects, including AI, VR, and more.
With this in mind, it’s a smart move for Meta to better align itself with the incoming government, though the appointments will raise some eyebrows among Silicon Valley pundits. That’s especially true given Meta’s more recent shift away from political content entirely, and it’ll be interesting to see whether this new team will look to force a re-think of that approach.
But it may also help to ensure that Meta doesn’t face the wrath of Trump, who at one time had threatened to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for what he saw has political interference.
Add to this the fact that Elon Musk is also set to play a key advisory role to the Trump team, and there is seemingly some risk that Meta could lose out, on various fronts, as Musk seeks to gain favor for his own competing AI and social media projects.
And Musk is also no fan of Zuckerberg, even challenging the Meta founder to a physical fight to sort out their differences.
With these pre-existing tensions, and Meta’s need for government cooperation, it seems inevitable that we are going to see a change in policy approach from the company around political speech, and that Kaplan will now be the one who’ll front that push, in a bid to appease Trump and Co.
Which may see this becoming a critical role that defines many of its future projects.
