Nick Clegg, Meta’s powerful head of policy and government affairs, is leaving the internet company as it prepares for a major shift in Washington, D.C., as Trump returns to the White House.
Clegg, a former U.K. Deputy prime minister who joined the company in 2018, will be replaced by Joel Kaplan, a veteran Republican party operative who served as former U.S. President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff.
The news, first reported by Semafor, represents a major shakeup on Meta’s senior leadership team and reflects the company’s efforts to adapt to a radically changed political landscape. Meta cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who previously had a strained relationship with Trump, has reportedly met with the President-elect in Florida, and Meta has recently pledged to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
“As a new year begins, 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,” Clegg said in a string of posts on X on Thursday.
“My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector. I hope I have played some role in seeking to bridge the very different worlds of tech and politics—worlds that will continue to interact in unpredictable ways across the globe,” Clegg wrote.
Clegg joined the company in 2018, when it was still called Facebook and was reelling from backlash over a string of user privacy mishaps and its role sharing misinformation during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Clegg helped launch the company’s oversight board, a panel of experts that makes decisions and advises Zuckerberg on Meta policies around content moderation, privacy, and other issues.
In 2022, Clegg was promoted to president of global affairs, a role that Zuckerberg said at the time elevated the former U.K. Politician to the same level as his own, while freeing Zuckerberg to focus on products and strategy.
With Trump set to return to the White House in a few weeks, Meta is facing a very different political environment. The President-elect, who once threatened to have Zuckerberg jailed, and his entourage of right-wing supporters are far more concerned about issues of free speech and alleged censorship on social media platforms than they are with curbing misinformation.
Clegg said on Thursday that he would leave Meta in the “next few months,” after handing over the reins to Kaplan, who he described as “quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time.”