| While most people outside Facebook have never heard of Joel Kaplan, his decade-plus tenure at the company "has coincided with Facebook's rise to global dominance—and its ascendance to the throne of permanent controversy," writes Benjamin Wofford in our April cover story. As vice president of global public policy, Kaplan is Facebook's most influential person in Washington, its most powerful conservative, and its most curious enigma. He's ruled over political speech on the platform, helping design policies that have protected far-right sites like Breitbart from punishment, created exemptions for public figures like Donald Trump, and squashed many internal projects that would have made Facebook less polarized. As Wofford illustrates in thumping detail, "long before he had ever heard Mark Zuckerberg's name, Kaplan was shaping the world that Facebook would someday dominate." He's something of a Forrest Gump of flashpoints in American politics in the 21st century. As a lawyer for the Bush campaign in 2000, he played a quiet role in the Brooks Brothers Riot during the Florida recount, seen by some as a precursor to the Capitol siege. He climbed the ranks of the Bush administration and was Zuckerberg's whisperer to the White House under Trump. He's also very close friends with Brett Kavanaugh; when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, the Kavanaughs stayed at the Kaplans' to avoid the press.
Wofford's story is as much a kaleidoscopic profile of a loathed, loved, brilliant, inscrutable, ruthlessly dutiful figure as it is the definitive account of how Facebook, under Kaplan's leadership, has built perhaps the most powerful lobby in Washington history, and how, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and the testimony of whistleblower Frances Haugen, that lobby and Kaplan are now in the fight of their lives. Zak Jason | Senior Associate Editor, WIRED |
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