Meta appoints executive with Republican ties to lead global policy

SAN FRANCISCO — Meta on Thursday appointed Joel Kaplan, a longtime executive who was a former senior adviser to George W. Bush and is known for his Republican ties, to be its new head of global policy, as the social media giant seeks to strengthen its links to the incoming Trump administration.

Kaplan, 55, replaces Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain who had handled policy and regulatory issues globally for Meta since 2018. In a post to his personal Facebook page, Clegg, 57, said that Kaplan was “quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time, ideally placed to shape the company’s strategy as societal and political expectations around technology continue to evolve.”

Kevin Martin, who has worked at Meta on policy issues for years, will take over Kaplan’s previous role as vice president of public policy.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, thanked Clegg in a comment on his Facebook post for making an “important impact advancing Meta’s voice and values around the world.”

Zuckerberg has aimed to unload politicking to subordinates in recent years, after spending much of the 2010s making trips to Washington to appease Congress, which questioned the role of his social media apps in spreading misinformation during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg dispatched Clegg to act as a kind of head of state for Meta, handling meetings with regulators globally and defending the company’s policy positions against increasingly hawkish government agencies.

Kaplan has many roots with conservatives and the Republican Party. After attending Harvard Law School, he clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and later served as Bush’s deputy chief of staff from 2006 to 2009.