When Mark Zuckerberg announced his “free speech” overhaul to Meta’s content moderation in January, the unexpected pivot was the culmination of months of planning with a tight-knit inner circle driven by one key adviser: Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan.
According to interviews with multiple current and former Meta employees, Kaplan has risen over the past decade to become Zuckerberg’s most trusted political fixer, and now the public face of the $1.7tn social media platform as Big Tech adapts to a second term under Donald Trump.
The conservative figure was promoted to head of global affairs shortly before Zuckerberg declared the company would loosen moderation policies and ditch fact-checking. He replaces liberal former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
Multiple former staffers claim that over the past decade, Kaplan has interfered in policy decisions, such as whether content should stay up or come down. They said he has in some cases overridden the company’s typical policy rationale or other senior decision makers in order to appease right-wing figures, lest they complain about being censored.
Kaplan has been adept at “kowtowing to what policymakers want without fundamentally altering the brand”, said one former senior employee who worked closely with him, adding: “Up until recently.”
“This is a very delicate political dance Joel has been helping Mark navigate,” said Katie Harbath, a former policy director who worked with Kaplan on Meta’s elections strategy for a decade. “But it’s a complicated situation with some harder trade-offs.”
In his first weeks in the role, Kaplan has attended the White House with Zuckerberg, and gone on a charm offensive in Europe, meeting leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the UK’s Sir Keir Starmer. “He has Mark’s ear in a way that nobody does,” said one person who has worked closely with Kaplan.
To some insiders, Kaplan is the reliable power broker Zuckerberg needs to help him woo the current administration and protect the company’s bottom line, as Trump threatens businesses that do not come to heel with retribution.
To critics, Kaplan’s focus on optics has come at the expense of online safety, and risks alienating some employees as he fashions policy on content moderation, as well as artificial intelligence guardrails and ethics.
He has also faced reputational blows, including revelations over past sexual harassment allegations from a former Meta executive, which emerged this week.
Harvard-educated Kaplan joined Meta, then Facebook, in 2011 following stints as a clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a Marine Corps officer, and as deputy chief of staff for policy in the White House during the George W Bush administration.
Current and former colleagues describe him as a respected legal expert who played a key role in expanding Meta’s lobbying heft and has regularly sought input from counterparts regardless of their politics.
“In an era where everybody is polarised, he is impressive in his ability to work with everyone across the spectrum,” said former top Meta executive Elliot Schrage.
His promotion comes as Zuckerberg has sought to rebuild relations with Trump, pursuing regulatory support for his plans to make Meta an “AI leader”. Trump has previously accused the billionaire of censorship and threatened to throw him in jail over alleged election interference.
Kaplan pushed for and helped craft the moderation changes, which have been widely viewed as a move to appease Trump, and were welcomed by the president.
One Meta insider said that they felt that Kaplan was instrumental in ensuring that Meta’s AI large language model Llama was neutral rather than sharing any political opinion in advance of the US election.
Kaplan also played a role in executing Meta’s decision to allow the company’s AI models to be used for US military purposes, the person said.
His Republican ties have caused controversy with left-leaning colleagues. In 2018, he attended the congressional grilling of his friend and then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a show of support. The move caused uproar among some Meta employees due to allegations that Kavanaugh committed a sexual assault as a teenager, which he has denied.
Kaplan addressed the issue with Facebook staff but then went on to host a party for Kavanaugh when he won the nomination, causing further internal upset.
In another episode, after Trump wrote a controversial post stating “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, Kaplan advised Trump’s team on how the president’s posts could remain up without breaking the platform’s policies over incitement to violence, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. They argued this went beyond typical processes.
Following those conversations, Trump added a post stating: “I don’t want this to happen. It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement.” Trump was later suspended from the platform in the wake of the January 6 riots for multiple policy violations.
“There is the written procedure and there is the Joel procedure,” said one former senior insider. “Joel would win every time. Nick [Clegg] had global power . . . But in the US, it has always been Joel. He’s the first among equals.” Meta declined to comment on the matter.
Kaplan came under scrutiny this week after a new book by former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams accused him of sexual harassment, including inappropriate comments. When she raised a complaint against Kaplan internally, she claims she was fired in retaliation in 2017.
Meta said Wynn-Williams, who is married to an FT editor, was dismissed “for poor performance and toxic behaviour” and Kaplan was cleared after an internal investigation “determined she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment”.
On Wednesday, Meta secured a ruling from an emergency arbitrator that temporarily prohibits the author from promoting the book.
Kaplan’s allies consider him a vital force for the company, with leaders such as Starmer and Meloni having productive discussions with him on his European tour, according to political advisers briefed on the meetings.
He considers Trump a defender of US business against a wave of regulation coming from the European Union, according to people familiar with his thinking.
“When companies are treated differently in a way that is discriminatory against them, then that should be highlighted to that company’s home government,” Kaplan told an audience in Munich last month. “So I think we will do that with President Trump.”
A Meta insider pointed to a speech by JD Vance last month in Paris, in which the vice-president blasted “excessive regulation” of the AI sector by the EU. “The speech was like talking points for Meta,” the person said, adding that they sounded like they could have been said by Kaplan himself.
Additional reporting by Anna Gross in London, Henry Foy in Brussels and Amy Kazmin in Rome
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