Former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg announced his decision to depart Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle at Meta on Thursday in the same cadences used by chartered accountants when announcing their decision to leave a firm.
“As a New Year begins”, wrote Clegg on Elon Musk’s “X”, “I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on from my role as President, Global Affairs at Meta. It truly has been the adventure of a lifetime!”
Clegg insisted he was “proud” of his work at Meta “leading and supporting teams across the globe to ensure innovation can go hand in hand with increased transparency and accountability”. His announcement was accompanied by a series of photographs, including one showing the former Liberal Democrat Party leader rock-climbing.
Buried at the end of the announcement, Clegg said that he was “simply thrilled” that his deputy, Joel Kaplan would succeed him. “I have laughed with, as well as learned from, Joel in equal measure” he wrote. “I very much look forward to spending the next few months handing over the reins… before finally leaving Meta after so many enjoyable years at the company”.
Nowhere in Clegg’s announcement was there any reference made to the elephant in the room: the fact that 18 days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, Zuckerberg had decided it was time to replace a man who claims to be committed to “transparency and accountability” with the tech industry’s most prominent Republican who has shown no similar predilections.
Kaplan, a former White House Deputy Chief of Staff in the administration of President George W. Bush, is no stranger to navigating a Trump-led Washington. In May 2020, as Facebook’s Vice President of Global Public Policy and leader of the company’s Washington office, he was credited with finding a way to keep Trump’s account on the platform active, even amid uproar among Facebook staff over the President’s inflammatory use of the platform.
In the midst of protests over the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police after he allegedly used a counterfeit bank note in a convenience store, Trump warned on Facebook that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. First used in the civil rights era by a white police chief with a long history of bigotry, the posting was widely seen as inflammatory, and at Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley many staff insisted Trump’s account be shut down.
Kaplan, now 55, proffered a different view, providing Zuckerberg with a series of possible interpretations of Trump’s comment that would allow it to fall within Facebook’s rules of service. After frantic phone calls between Zuckerberg and Trump, the President published a second post in which he said he had invoked the ‘looting and shooting’ phraseology “as a fact, not a statement…. I don’t want it to happen”. That language allowed Trump’s account to remain active.
It was only after the deadly Capitol Hill uprising of 6 January 2021 that the President’s account was finally suspended, a decision announced by Clegg. “We believe his actions constituted a severe violation of the rules which merit the highest penalty available”, the former UK Deputy Prime Minister thundered at the time.
Washington already knows that Kaplan is cut from an entirely different cloth. In a March 2022 profile, Wired magazine accused him of playing “a pivotal role in exempting politicians from Facebook’s community standards, protecting shock-jock sites like Breitbart from punishment, and throttling algorithmic changes that might have made Facebook less politically polarized”.
In November 2021, Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, a highly respected non-governmental organisation seeking to provide American families with trustworthy information and education, told The Washington Post that “Kaplan is on the wrong side of history” and “will go down in the history books as one of the people who caused great damage to our democracy and our society for short-term economic business reasons”.
Now more than ever, Zuckerberg has decided he needs a man like Kaplan. As he and his fellow tech bros pledge fealty to Trump, Clegg’s departure coupled with Kaplan’s appointment sends a clear message to the President-elect’s transition headquarters in Mar-A-Lago: Meta will give Trump no problems over the next four years, and will, in return, hope to benefit greatly from the new dispensation in Washington.
