Facebook figure tries to repair ties to the right
WASHINGTON — Hours after the publication of a news report last week accusing Facebook of anti-conservative bias, the company’s top Republican executive moved into damage-control mode.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy and a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sent a message to Barry Bennett, a Republican campaign strategist. Kaplan disputed the article by the technology site Gizmodo that said Facebook was suppressing rightwing stories and asked Bennett, a friend from the 2000 presidential election and a campaign coordinator for Donald Trump, for advice on how to repair the social network’s image with the right.
Bennett said he suggested Facebook meet with prominent Republican politicians and pundits. Within days, Kaplan organized a meeting at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Kaplan will preside over that meeting on Wednesday with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and nearly a dozen conservatives, including Glenn Beck of TheBlaze television network and Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator and a leading figure in the Tea Party movement.
Kaplan is “walking a tightrope,” said Bennett, who will also attend the meeting. “Facebook is becoming such a powerful tool, everyone is watching it with a microscope.”
The scramble by Kaplan, a little-known figure outside Washington politics, shows just how hard it is to meaningfully change the image of Facebook as a politically liberal organization strongly attached to the Democratic Party. That image — fostered by how outspoken Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, have been about their liberal beliefs — is increasingly important to change given the company’s enormous influence with 1.65 billion members worldwide and its role as a distributor of information.