MAGA's man inside Meta

The fusillade of major announcements from Meta this month — including the termination of its fact-checking and DEI programs and the ascension of its enigmatic content-moderation czar, Joel Kaplan, to head global policy — prompted a familiar churn of political reaction across the left and right. But virtually everyone agrees on one thing: Meta's changes are designed, at least in part, to please the incoming administration of Donald Trump.

That is why the most consequential announcement involves Joel Kaplan, Zuckerberg's tight-lipped political consigliere. For the coming years, Kaplan will be the face in your living room, justifying Meta's handling of whatever crisis, catastrophe, or hypocrisy the new Trump era is likely to ring in. He will speak at Davos, before committees, and on "Good Morning America," defending Meta publicly — and Mark Zuckerberg personally — from the right, the left, and quite possibly from Trump himself.

Kaplan is not widely known. Yet he arguably has done more to shape the modern internet — and quicken its consolidation with and capture of American politics — than any non-CEO in the world. With his ascension to the chief policy position at Meta, Kaplan etches his name into the pantheon of great political actors on the Washington stage — akin to a combination of Rahm Emanuel and Henry Kissinger, if they'd had every major global tech CEO on speed dial.

You can understand Kaplan's value to Meta by appreciating the two dimensions that account for his rise: Kaplan as the talented political fixer, and as the free-speech intellectual. Two distinct stories capture both dimensions of Kaplan's impact on Meta and on Zuckerberg.

Months before Trump was suspended from Facebook in 2021 following the attack of January 6, Trump's account was very nearly curtailed in an entirely separate ordeal. During the George Floyd protests and riots of 2020, Trump wrote a message on Facebook that ignominiously warned, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts." Per Facebook's rules, which prohibit incitement to violence, Trump's post possibly merited a takedown.

For Meta, this was a problem from hell. Not removing Trump's post would inflame liberal America. Removing it would enrage conservatives — not to mention the sitting president, who just days before had threatened to punish Meta for its alleged anti-conservative bias.

Then something miraculous happened: Trump called Zuckerberg. As Zuckerberg would tell it — mirroring a version later to be widely retold — Trump called Zuckerberg to plead his case, while Zuckerberg lectured Trump about using the platform responsibly. Hours later, another miracle followed: Trump wrote a follow-up post to finesse his point, quelling the discord.

The crisis was averted. Equally important, however, was the supposed lesson of this story: Trump — desperate to keep his account intact — needed Meta.

This story has been broadly reported. But stories that involve Kaplan tend to have a carefully hidden trap door.

As it turned out, there was a problem with this account: It was precisely backward. In the early morning of May 29, 2020, White House staffers gathered around on speakerphone and listened in disbelief to the voice on the other end: It was Mark Zuckerberg — calling them, at Kaplan's arrangement — asking for a personal word with Trump. Those familiar with this call would later say Zuckerberg's request was tinged with vulnerability, as he and Kaplan, also on the call, described the inevitable liberal revolt at Meta's headquarters if something weren't done about Trump's post. "I have a staff problem," Zuckerberg explained, according to those with knowledge of the call. (Meta has previously denied Zuckerberg said anything to this effect, maintaining that Zuckerberg was unequivocal in condemning the post.) When Trump rang Zuckerberg's cell later that afternoon, it wasn't contrition he was showing Zuckerberg — it was a favor.

This story, and its turns, illuminates several key things. First, it suggests the lengths Meta will go to convince the public that Trump — just like its 3 billion users — was dependent upon Meta for relevance. It shows the cunning of Kaplan in finding a way to project that image — through a half story that was widely repeated in official Washington — while simultaneously defusing a serious crisis (Kaplan had put out a "four-alarm fire," one of his former staffers previously told me).

Above all, it illustrates the dependency that animates Zuckerberg and Trump's relationship, and hints at what direction it runs in: Meta needs Trump — perhaps a lot more than Trump needs Meta.

For much of his life, Kaplan has played exactly this sort of role: attendant lord and advisor to princes. After finishing at the top of his class at Harvard Law School and serving as an officer in the Marine Corps, Kaplan clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; played a pivotal role in the events leading to Bush v. Gore; and became a senior advisor to George Bush during all eight years. He was among the closest advisors to his longtime friend Brett Kavanaugh, counseling the judge at the darkest hour of his confirmation fiasco.

But it's his role serving Zuckerberg that is the male relationship that defines Kaplan's professional life and achievements. Since joining Meta in 2011, Kaplan has helped navigate Zuckerberg's path and entry into official Washington. Initially, that entailed accompanying a young Zuckerberg to President Barack Obama's Oval Office, or overseeing Zuckerberg's preparation for congressional hearings. But with the explosion of MAGA, Kaplan's role grew dramatically, charting a path that would bring Zuckerberg and a fast-changing Republican Party into something resembling — if not goodwill — then a mutual accord.

Half of this Zuckerberg achieved himself, by slotting Kaplan into a major role overseeing content moderation. But the human side of Washington — never Zuckerberg's strong suit — was Kaplan's métier: arranging Oval Office huddles with Zuckerberg and Trump, or organizing a series of private dinners with mostly conservative (and some liberal) influencers. Kaplan, as Meta staffers and Washington Republicans told me, made sure that MAGA Republicans knew they always had a seat at Zuckerberg's proverbial table. (Meta did not provide new comment for this story.)

This growing authority inside Meta left many idealist staffers convinced of Kaplan's thralldom to conservative ideology. But Kaplan is also beloved and defended by many Democrats at Meta and throughout Washington — a fact that explains, in part, Meta's successful evasion of any significant tech regulation during the Biden presidency.

And yet Kaplan's most remarkable achievement is playing out right now: the extraordinary — once unthinkable — political romance between Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump. A decade ago, the chasm separating these individuals seemed as insurmountably wide as that between the Capulets and the Montagues. Yet the two men have spent years running toward each other, barreling through and against the gauntlet of their respective tribes: Zuckerberg through the leftist principles of the Bay, Trump through Republican Washington.

In this slow-motion marriage plot, Joel Kaplan is their Friar Laurence, bringing his artful guile and influence to bear in the improbable effort to knit their two families together. Kaplan has "helped make sure the ties were never irrevocably broken — even through Trump being deplatformed," observes Katie Harbath, a Republican who served as public policy director under Kaplan for a decade and who now heads the tech consulting firm Anchor Change. "Joel was sort of the captain of that ship."

Beginning with Trump's rise in 2016, Kaplan grew into another significant role: a de facto superintendent of the platform's rules around speech and content moderation. It's in this role — as a legal intellectual offering a distinct philosophy of free expression — that colleagues say Kaplan has shaped the company publicly, and Zuckerberg personally.

It was Kaplan, for example, who appeared on Fox News last week to explain the end of the fact-checking program, characterizing the decision as an effort to "reset the balance in favor of free expression." This echoed Zuckerberg's own video announcement, in which he lamented that the program had become "just too politically biased."

These comments are of a piece with Kaplan's own philosophy on free expression, which colleagues have summed up in the adage by Justice Louis Brandeis: that the remedy for false or misleading speech isn't "enforced silence," but instead "more speech."

It is tempting to view the complex issues at Meta as a simple proxy battle between "pro" and "anti" free expression. The fact-checking program was not without errors, as any complex program will be. And it is a genuine win for free expression that restrictions on user speech — on topics such as immigration, or gender and sexuality — are now lifted. Same for the nixing of DEI programs, which too often function to manufacture consensus on live issues at the internal staff level.

But the truth is there have long been meaningful objections to Kaplan's — and increasingly Zuckerberg's — Brandeisian "more speech" rationale that Meta so often proffers for its decisions.

The first is that, when it comes to political expression, the basis for Meta's decisions often manifests not as high principle, but as political expediency.

The fact-checking program is a case in point. Few programs were so vocally targeted — and fervently manipulated — by conservative critics. For any conservative media publisher dinged for misinformation by Meta's algorithm, Kaplan's cellphone effectively functioned as a personalized, interlocutory appeals process. Such was the case with articles by Breitbart, or the Instagram posts of Charlie Kirk, who successfully appealed to Kaplan to intervene, and to have their flags or strikes removed. Or in the case of Meta's filter against "Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior," which Kaplan and other executives quickly froze, around the time they learned that its classifier had begun flagging posts from The Daily Wire and Sinclair.

The second problem is that Kaplan's defenders have fallen under a common misreading of Brandeis. Unlike Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., his fellow Supreme Court justice— who generally prized individual autonomy — Brandeis believed the ultimate purpose of free expression was the preservation of democratic self-government itself. The reason "more speech" offers an effective remedy is that, in Brandeis' view, the freedom of unlimited speech was inextricably married with duty: what he called "the political duty of public discussion." Duty is a word that generally conveys the foregoing of certain liberties, to achieve a higher purpose. The Brandeisian view, in essence, described the First Amendment as a kind of bargain struck with Americans at large: In exchange for a near-bottomless freedom to purvey unlimited speech, Americans accepted an implied duty to yield to the necessary prerogatives of well-ordered public discussion.

Yet under Kaplan's Policy team, content decisions at Meta consistently tacked away from Brandeis' view. Perhaps no controversy illustrates the point better than a project called Common Ground.

Conceived by Meta staff in response to the 2016 election, Common Ground was a proposal to remake Facebook into a forum for healthier public discussion. In a bundle of proposed algorithm changes — detailed in internal memos — the program would replace users' self-segregation with more "exposure to cross-cutting viewpoints," downplay "incivility," recommend that users join more politically diverse groups, and boost news outlets with high bipartisan readership.

Though perhaps idealistic-sounding, Common Ground was not a left-wing chimera. In fact, its premise was drawn in part from the research of the New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt — a famously vocal critic of progressive ideology in college campuses and workplaces — whose findings Meta staffers had studied rigorously. It was precisely the sort of project that would make liberals more likely to encounter, say, a Wall Street Journal op-ed article opposing mask mandates.

Kaplan and his team, however, correctly sensed that such proposals — no matter how "nonpartisan" in fact — would be castigated as partisan in appearance. In internal review sessions, Kaplan's team raised its concerns that the proposal would have a disparate effect on conservative users.

But the true killer lurked in a crucial detail: Exposure to this more ennobled strain of public discussion tended to reduce the engagement that users had with the platform. In a business model in which enragement equals engagement, it turns out, Brandeisian discussion is an unwarranted expense.

Kaplan's defenders backstop these choices with a common refrain: Kaplan's team has ensured Meta's content policies remain "defensible." By "defensible," Meta staffers intend to invoke the importance of public accountability. What they tend to mean, though, is policies that can adequately be explained during a grilling before Congress — an understandable concern for a company that's been hauled before Congress more than 30 times.

That is perfectly plausible reasoning. But one thing it certainly isn't is a vindication of First Amendment values — a bulwark in the Constitution whose singular purpose, after all, is to prevent meddling by Congress, and government generally. Zuckerberg now says he regrets caving to pressure from the Biden administration during the COVID pandemic. But does anyone doubt that, the next time Trump calls Zuckerberg, the CEO won't be all ears? (Just as he was avidly listening when Jared Kushner similarly pressured Zuckerberg in 2020, arm-twisting repeatedly to cooperate with Trump's COVID response.) Kaplan is there to ensure the message, even if not followed upon, gets through loud and clear.

Putting a chief Washington lobbyist largely in charge of speech policy may be politically savvy. But it is the opposite of how a company would take seriously its obligations to free expression — an invitation, essentially, to a Republican Congress, or a Democratic White House, to inject politicians' notions about public discourse into your news feed. "One thing I notice," Harbath notes thoughtfully, "is that after every major election since 2016, Mark has done this big recalibration about how the company handles content, based upon the electoral results."

Critics of Kaplan's supposed right-leaning bias, then, miss the point. It's that Kaplan and Zuckerberg's commitment to Brandesian free expression, as Gandhi might say, would make for an excellent idea. And some of Meta's changes — relaxing the restrictions on immigration and gender — are indeed aligned with liberal principles of free expression. But unavoidably, the platform remains a Death Star of bad reasoning, amplifying the worst of the left and right. Nor would Brandeis recognize Kaplan's enthusiasm for the incoming President Trump and his administration as "big defenders of free expression" — a man who sues local newspapers as retribution for polls, publicly invites violence on journalists, and suggests the US military shoot protesters for exercising their First Amendment rights — perhaps the most anti-First Amendment candidate for president since Woodrow Wilson. Both on the platform and off, Meta's commitment reflects the opposite of Brandeis' well-ordered public discussion: a world of all freedom, and no duty.

One silver lining to Meta's termination of fact-checking, then, is that it has the potential to clarify a new consensus: one that recognizes the futility of the agonizing efforts of the past 10 years attempting to liberalize social media — as fruitless and naive as environmentalists who implore oil and gas companies to cease being oil and gas companies. Scholars such as Yuval Noah Harari and Jonathan Rauch have separately argued that social media at scale is inherently inimical to liberal values — and that its mob-like pathologies, with its viral lies and conspiratorial reasoning, eerily resemble the same tendencies of pre-Enlightenment, medieval Europe.

That sort of tragedy can be laid at the feet only of generations, not individuals. And that is the deep and common bond that Zuckerberg and Trump share. Both are men whose vast seizure of power was made possible by the energy and unique pathology of the mob — allowing one to build a company, the other a political movement — as they leveraged its bizarre vise grip on our attention along with the mob's enduring ability, as Holmes warned, to "set fire to reason." In bringing these men to power, the best and brightest of their generation — Joel Kaplan, Sheryl Sandberg, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, nearly all the same age — ushered in a new strain of faithlessness, turning social media into a prison, and making our public life a hostage of the internet.

Zuckerberg and Kaplan's announcement is not an embrace of the right, or repudiation of the left. It's another example of what Meta does too often: wrap its business and political decisions into the language of liberal values and free expression. In reality, Meta does have a clear policy around free expression — but it doesn't follow the philosophical quotations of Louis Brandeis, or Oliver Wendell Holmes. Rather, under Zuckerberg and Kaplan, Meta's North Star will always faithfully resemble the old chestnut from Lyndon B. Johnson: "Power is where power goes."

Benjamin Wofford has written for Wired, Politico Magazine, Vox, and Rolling Stone, and is a graduate of Stanford Law School.