Meta’s course correction

The adage “personnel is policy” remains true. Choosing the right individuals can profoundly shape outcomes for an organization, no matter how large or small. We are seeing this changeover in the nation’s capital with the advent of a new administration. Over the past two months, there have been nonstop updates about various people who have been tapped for new roles in President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet and other agency positions.

This sea change of new personnel isn’t just limited to the government but also includes companies that shape our culture. It can be as simple enough as hiring Republicans when a Republican president wins or promoting Democrats when their team comes out on top.

We often correctly see these corporate announcements with an eye of cynicism. It is understandable because many of these changes have no real effect on the lives of consumers or voters. Yet, sometimes companies make personnel changes that we should scrutinize because they are signs of a significant shift that goes beyond the boardroom and actually affects our lives.

That is exactly what is happening at Meta, with the announcement that it is promoting Joel Kaplan to president of global affairs this spring. He will succeed liberal Nick Clegg, the former U.K. politician who has been in that position since 2018. It was Clegg who oversaw many of Meta’s content moderation decisions, but he recently admitted, “Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly.”

Kaplan joined Meta in 2011, and throughout his tenure, he was often the minority voice advocating against pushes for more aggressive content moderation. A Wall Street Journal article from 2018 explained how “Mr. Kaplan, joined by other Facebook executives, argued that the efforts to mitigate polarization could disproportionately hurt conservative voices, triggering claims of bias and exposing Facebook to allegations of social-engineering.” Instead, he has regularly promoted internally a light touch to content moderation that enables more speech, not less, an approach that would not suppress or censor conservative ideas from being shared.

It really is not surprising that he is sympathetic to the experiences of conservatives on social media. Considering that before Meta, Kaplan had been a veteran of conservative politics and policy debates. His résumé includes a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a stint as deputy chief of staff for policy for President George W. Bush. He has been central to the efforts to rebuild relationships and trust between Meta and Republican policymakers.

Often, Kaplan has been out of the public’s eye, working behind the scenes. Yet, it is also worth noting that when the lights were brightest, he was in full view, demonstrating loyalty and friendship to a fellow conservative when few would. Despite calls for his resignation by outraged liberal Facebook colleagues, Kaplan sat right behind his friend Brett Kavanaugh during the liberal witch hunt at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2018. He never blinked as progressive activists made up stories and conflated narratives to get a scalp from the then–Supreme Court nominee.

It would have been easy for Kaplan to send his friend “thoughts and prayers” and not show up for the kangaroo court that took place on Capitol Hill. But no, Kaplan was there every step of the way for Kavanaugh, taking on stray arrows and ridicule aimed at himself and standing up for truth and integrity while almost losing his job in the process.

It is also clear that this courage under fire also caught the attention of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has kept Kaplan close even when it was unpopular within the company to do so. Now, more than six years after the Kavanaugh hearing, Zuckerberg is promoting Kaplan to this important role. Taking Kaplan’s place as Meta’s vice president of public policy is former Republican Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, who shares a similar approach to Kaplan’s concerning content moderation practices.

With the Trump administration set to take charge on Monday, many Big Tech companies like Apple and Google are hoping their CEOs can woo Republicans with a phone call, dinner, or even a flashy press release.

Now it is true Zuckerberg has also made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, but instead of relying solely on the personality of its CEO, Meta is taking a different tack. It is making a full-scale culture change, which starts with personnel. The company is empowering people internally who actually understand the interests and ideas of conservatives, individuals who themselves have stood up to the woke mob and resisted cancel culture.

Hopefully, this course correction is just the beginning for Meta, with personnel changes that directly result in new and better policies that foster free speech and open discourse on its social media platforms.