• by Colin Kirkland , January 2, 2025

Meta's longtime policy chief and former Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain Nick Clegg is leaving his role at the tech company and will be replaced by his deputy Joel Kaplan, known as a prominent figure in Republican circles and the most notable conservative Meta employee.

According to Clegg's post on Facebook, Kaplan “is quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time,” alluding to Meta's future during Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States.

Clegg, who helped create Meta's third-party content policy Oversight Board, added that in his new role, Kaplan will ideally “shape the company's strategy as societal and political expectations around technology continue to evolve.”

Prior to joining Facebook in 2011, Kaplan served as a deputy chief of staff to former President George W. Bush. In 2020, Kaplan reportedly argued that some of the company's content-moderation practices were harmful to conservative voices. 

Kaplan's appointment as Meta's chief global affairs officer comes at a time when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is working to repair Meta's relationship with Trump, who accused Zuckerberg of plotting against him during his 2020 Presidential campaign, ultimately threatening the CEO and even stating he would “spend the rest of his life in prison."

Zuckerberg has since traveled to Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-A-Lago to meet privately with the president-elect, while Meta has donated $1 million to the upcoming inauguration. Meta also reinstated Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2023, after they were suspended in reaction to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Kevin Martin, who was FCC chairman under Bush, will now move into Kaplan's former role as Meta’s vice president of global policy.

In his recent Facebook post, Clegg wrote that his “time at the company conceded with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested into new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector.”

The former policy chief added that he hopes he helped bridge the gap between tech and politics, “worlds that will continue to interact in unpredictable ways across the globe.”