Joel Kaplan
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
They've just become too restrictive over time about what people can say, including about those kind of sensitive topics that you mentioned that people want to discuss and debate. Immigration, trans issues, gender.
It's Been a Minute
Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you can say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship. So we're changing those rules.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
There's no question that the things that happen at Met are coming from Mark. But there's also no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure all in the direction of of more content moderation, more censorship. And we've got a real opportunity now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
We've got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression. And that makes a difference. One of the things we've experienced is that when you have a U.S.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
president administration that's pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don't even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies. We're going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Biggest FBI Scandal In History Is Unfolding (Ep. 2395)
Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Biggest FBI Scandal In History Is Unfolding (Ep. 2395)
Well, that's not good. Politico with this headline. New research shows the massive hole that the Dems are in. Even voters who previously backed Democrats cast the party as weak and overly focused on diversity and elites.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Biggest FBI Scandal In History Is Unfolding (Ep. 2395)
If you're making big changes, does that mean you were doing something wrong before?
The Dan Bongino Show
The Biggest FBI Scandal In History Is Unfolding (Ep. 2395)
Look, this is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression. As Mark says in that video, what we're doing today is we're getting back to our roots in free expression. There's a number of changes we're making, but if I could just highlight three. Yep. eliminating the third-party fact-checking system.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Biggest FBI Scandal In History Is Unfolding (Ep. 2395)
Well-intentioned at the outset, but there's just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check and how, so we're just scrapping it entirely. What do you mean? You mean you? The fact-checkers. You set up your, well, they are yours.
The Dan Bongino Show
The Biggest FBI Scandal In History Is Unfolding (Ep. 2395)
Well, so the idea was they're independent fact-checkers, but they've just been too biased, and so what we're going to do instead is adopt a system like X has of community notes. So we're just going to rely on our own community of users to provide people more information about what they're seeing, and we think that's going to work great.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
And formally, his role has been to forecast and manage policy risk. Functionally, his role in the last 10 years has grown to be as sprawling, basically, as Facebook's reach itself. And it involves overseeing a prolific lobby in Washington, D.C., which is managing relations with the federal government and state capitals.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
And he leads, Kaplan, a team of about 1,000 policy staff worldwide in Facebook, shaping and massaging and sometimes thwarting the international laws and regulatory bodies and policies that graze any part of Facebook's enormous business. But it's this third role that has made Kaplan so controversial, and that is helping design and arbitrate
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
Facebook's policies on political speech, which have changed so much and so dramatically over the last 10 years.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
Kaplan's role for the first three years, he's one of a number of elder statesman types surrounding a younger Zuckerberg who has increasingly realized that the reach of his company is going to be entangled in policy matters in Washington. Senator, we run ads. I see.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
It's during this period, you call it sort of from 2011 to 2016, that Kaplan, if not a mentor, is sort of described by colleagues as sort of an older brother figure to a younger Zuckerberg. He's accompanying Zuckerberg to tech summits in the Obama Oval Office.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
By the time Kaplan comes out of those eight years in the Bush White House, he's got a reputation as a real bipartisan impresario. So Kaplan is a certain breed of Bush conservative that is open-handed and warm and interested in bipartisan compromise. And it's part of why he's so prolific and such a valuable asset to any lobbying operation or company, but especially to Facebook.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
There are lots of these moments where Facebook is growing. It stumbles on some kind of tripwire of conservative politics it didn't know was there. And the company sort of frantically looks around and says, who do we have who's like a singular Republican operative who can help us with this problem? And over and over and over again, the answer is just Joel Kaplan, Joel Kaplan, Joel Kaplan.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
But the real hinge moment comes in 2016. I mean, this is the first real crisis that Kaplan solves. And it's sort of a foreshadow of events. But it's a famous episode in May 2016, still known inside Facebook as sort of the Gizmodo affair. Gizmodo publishes an article alleging that Facebook's trending topics widget is biased against conservative media publishers.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
Kaplan calls an old friend who's working on the Trump campaign and he designs this summit at Menlo Park where he's going to bring in these conservative media heavyweights, more than a dozen of these big-name guests. They include Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck and Dana Perino. And they get sort of this VIP treatment. Zuckerberg gives a seminar where he –
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
explains to them the problem, what they're doing, how they're going to solve this and sort of finesse and massage and charms them. And Kaplan, of course, is preparing the summit, briefing Zuckerberg, walking him through the talking points. And it works. When the conservatives kind of come back from the summit, the consensus is that, you know, Kaplan sort of put out this four-alarm fire.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
The trending topics widget controversy showed three things. One, that there were these political landmines that Zuckerberg and Facebook might not realize exist. Two, that Kaplan was the person that could navigate Zuckerberg and the company around them. And three, just as often as not, those types of landmines were about content and speech and the speech product.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
And so if you thought of this as a unified problem, right, you would want one person to be in charge of a unified solution. And at that point, Merson more or less becomes Kaplan.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
Smart people and scholars who think about the architecture of the internet and social media really encourage people to step back and look at Facebook and think about how unusual it is and how not obvious or self-explanatory it is.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
that the person who would be in charge of your political lobbying and policy operation is also largely in charge of crafting and designing the policies around content and speech. I think the one inside story that really summarizes Kaplan's role and influence happens in 2017. And that's with a really radical proposal called Common Ground.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
So after 2016, there's this shock about the election and how ugly it was. And Common Ground has these big ambitious goals all about reducing polarization with a cocktail of what they call, quote, aggressive interventions. They're going to downrank ugly incivility and optimize for, quote, good conversations and upregulate that kind of discussion. And it's all about the algorithm.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
So the new algorithm was going to recommend users join more politically diverse groups, for example. It was going to reduce the viral reach of hyperactive, hyperpartisan users. And the Common Ground team is really juiced. They're excited. They've hung posters around the office in Menlo Park that have their motto on it and say things like, reduce polarization or reduce hate.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
And then Common Ground runs into Joel Kaplan. And Kaplan's policy team grills these programmers and project managers with questions. Questions not just about how it's going to be perceived by users, but how the changes will be experienced and perceived by political stakeholders.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
And with Trump in office, Facebook is much more sensitive to how any changes, even neutral nonpartisan changes like common ground, might be perceived by politicians or media persona who have a big megaphone. and can generate a political crisis and headache for Facebook.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
So in the end, a few of the tweaks of Common Ground got through, but in the end, almost all of Common Ground was scrapped and put on the shelf and never saw the light of day.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
So to me, Kaplan's professional life. And his corporate values at Facebook suggest to me that there's almost no limit to the necessities and prerogatives of survival that Kaplan can't find a way to accommodate. I guess a different way of putting this would be Zuckerberg's donating...
Today, Explained
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a million dollars to the inaugural committee or going to Mar-a-Lago or bringing an MMA executive onto the corporate board. Those are really obvious, jarring ways that we can see Zuckerberg more than almost any other, not only tech company, but really any other major corporation in the United States. Facebook has managed to stand out in subjecting itself to the coming Trump wave.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
And Kaplan's appointment to lead global policy is, to me, actually the ur-example of all of those things. Kaplan's singular achievement, I think, of the last eight years is finding a way to accommodate the brash ugliness of MAGA Washington and MAGA conservatism with the elite burnish and
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
you know, professionalized corporate values of Facebook and the corporate world, you know, the next four years of Trump is going to be what Kaplan does best, which is just an era of serious and profound accommodation of Facebook or by Facebook of Trump. You know, if you can think of
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
all the unsavory ways that an empowered Trump might want to use Facebook for illegitimate ends, Kaplan is going to be the person in charge of figuring out a way to accommodate Trump and MAGA conservatism as far as it can go and pushing the breaking point further and further before it becomes untenable for Facebook.
Today, Explained
Zuck your feelings
Hani Fareed, who's a professor at UC Berkeley, calls Joel Kaplan the most influential person at Facebook that most people haven't heard of. There's no question that the things that happen at Meta are coming from Mark. But there's also no question that there has been a change over the last- So Kaplan for the last 15 years or so has had this extremely important role at Facebook.