Nick Clegg leaves Meta ahead of Trump’s profitability as US president
MetaFormer deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg is to step down from his current job as president of global affairs at social media giant Meta.
In a post on Meta’s Facebook on Thursday, Sir Nick, a former chief of the Liberal Democrats, said he was departing the corporation after nearly seven years.
He will be replaced by his current deputy and Republican Joel Kaplan, who previously served as deputy chief of staff in the White House during President George W Bush’s administration, and is known for handling the corporation’s relations with Republicans.
He added that he would spend “a few months handing over the reins” and representing Facebook at international gatherings before moving on to “recent adventures”.
Sir Nick’s resignation comes just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The president-elect has repeatedly accused Meta and other platforms of censorship and silencing conservative talk.
His relations with Mr Zuckerberg have been particularly strained, after Facebook and Instagram suspended the former president’s accounts for two years in 2021, after they said he praised those engaged in violence at the Capitol on 6 January.
More recently, Trump threatened to imprison Mr Zuckerberg if he interfered in the 2024 election, and even called Facebook an “foe of the people” in March.
However tensions appear to be thawing between the two, with the pair dining at Trump’s Florida estate in Mar-a-Lago since the US election.
Mr Zuckerberg also congratulated him on his win and donated $1m (£786,000) to an inauguration pool.
Sir Nick’s departure is seen by some analysts as a nod to the changing of the guard in Washington.
He joined Facebook in 2018, after losing his seat as an MP in 2017. He was later promoted to president of global affairs, a prominent position at Meta.
In a statement announcing he would step down, Sir Nick said his successor Joel Kaplan is “quite clearly the correct person for the correct job at the correct period”.
Trump was photographed with Mr Kaplan at the recent York distribute swap last month.
During his period at Meta, Sir Nick established himself not only as a spokesperson but also a bridge between governments, regulators and the tech firm.
As recent regulation and legislation began to force social media companies to receive more responsibility for the content on their platforms and the consequences of it, that role became crucial.
He oversaw the creation of the Oversight Board, an independent body set up to oversee Meta’s content moderation decisions.
He said recently, however, that the firm’s actions had resulted in some people being “unfairly penalised” on its platforms too often.
Sir Nick has also been open about his views on Trump’s close friend, Elon Musk, describing him as a political puppet master, claiming he has turned X, formerly Twitter, into a “one-man hyper-partisan hobby horse”.
The former Liberal Democrat chief moved to Silicon Valley initially but returned to London in 2022.
He said he was moving on to “recent adventures” with “immense gratitude and self-esteem” at what he had been part of.
“My period at the corporation coincided with a significant resetting of the connection between ‘large tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in recent laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector,” he said.
“I aspiration 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.”
North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
