Facebook Exec Fawns Over Trump’s Commitment to ‘Free Expression’ While Defending End of Fact-Checking to Fox & Friends
Meta’s newly appointed head of Global Affairs was not shy in repeatedly praising President-elect Donald Trump during a Tuesday morning appearance on Fox & Friends.
Joel Kaplan is the former White House Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush. He was recently hired to run Meta’s public policy department, which is notable partly due to his past criticism of Facebook for censorship. He appeared on the Fox News morning show to discuss new content moderation policies on Facebook and Instagram, which were announced by Mark Zuckerberg earlier in the day.
The co-hosts of Fox & Friends open with a healthy level of skepticism, with Lawrence Jones noting Zuckerberg’s clear change from “nerdy kid” to a jujitsu aficionado with lean muscles. However, the clear takeaway from the interview was Kaplan’s repeated gushing of praise for Trump, which nearly rose to “dear leader” levels.
“Well, there’s no question that the things that happened at MIT are coming from Mark,” Kaplan replied, adding, “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 more content moderation, more censorship.”
“And we’ve got a real opportunity now,” Kaplan continued. “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. president, an 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 US companies. We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.”
When asked why these changes were happening now, just weeks before Trump is set to take office, Kaplan did not demure, saying, “There’s no question that there’s an opportunity here with the new president taking office, as I said, who really believes in free expression. And that’s just going to give us the space to get back to those values that Mark has talked about for a long.”
Moments later, Kaplan hit the very same note when pressed if the idea was to get politics entirely out of Facebook and Instagram.
“There is a real opportunity to work with the new administration, both on free expression, but also on American leadership and technology and innovation,” he said. “This is something we’ve seen. President Trump is really focused on making sure that we maintain U.S. competitiveness and leadership on technology, things like AI. Those are obviously super important to our company in our industry, and we’ll look forward to working with the new administration to advance those goals.”
Jones offered a bit of skepticism, perhaps noting the repeated fawning of Trump, asking his guest if he could “tell the audience in the world that this is not a temporary stance? And what I mean by that is this just because you’ve got Donald Trump in there for four years. Are you guys going to continue this after his presidency or is this just a temporary thing for the moment?”
“This is an opportunity for us to get back to the values that Mark founded the company on. This runs deep for Mark. It’s a great opportunity to rebalance and to get back to free expression,” he replied.
And in the event the fawning of Trump wasn’t clear enough, Kaplan found time to even heap praise on Elon Musk when asked about the world’s richest man turned Trump advisor.
“I think he once played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression,” Kaplan said of Musk, once Zuckerberg’s rival. “That’s been that’s been really constructive and productive. And we’re just glad that we’ve got the opportunity now to to make these kind of changes and to get back to our roots in free expression.”
Watch above via Fox News.
