Meta has kicked off the new year with a high-stakes game of musical chairs ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Nick Clegg, the UK’s former deputy Prime Minister who’s been the company’s President of Global Affairs since 2022, is out. All eyes are now on his replacement, Joel Kaplan, who’s worked at the company since 2011. He was most recently its vice president of global public policy and leader of its DC office, although he is perhaps better known for being a former White House aide to George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009.
Kaplan’s appointment at Meta, which currently has more than 3bn users worldwide, was first reported by Semafor at the end of last week – the opening paragraph of his Wikipedia profile was updated almost immediately. His ascent is a sign that Meta is trying to improve its standing with the President-elect after a decade of friction between Trump and Meta's founder, Mark Zuckerberg. “Facebook was always anti-Trump,” the MAGA leader once said, even before he was banned from Meta’s biggest platform in the aftermath of January 6, 2021. The ban lasted more than two years and extended to Instagram; Trump was not reinstated until February 7, 2023, at which point Meta announced there would be “new guardrails in place” to deter him from “repeat offenses”.
