The European Union has been a huge pain for Meta over the years as it’s faced billions of dollars in fines from its regulators.
The Facebook owner may now have a new weapon in its artillery to defend itself from future enforcement abroad: President Donald Trump.
Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan told a panel of European policymakers that the company would not shy away from letting Trump know when it felt that it had been discriminated against by the EU. He suggested Trump may step in to help out.
“President Trump has made clear since he’s taken office that he is going to defend US companies and US business abroad, and particularly if he feels that US companies have been treated unfairly,” Kaplan said, speaking on Sunday at the Munich Security Conference.
“What he decides to do about it is clearly up to him, but I don’t think we’re going to shy away from saying when we think that the enforcement of these laws is being directed at us in a way that goes beyond what the parliament passed and what the institutions passed,” Kaplan said.
Meta has faced massive fines by EU regulators in recent years. In 2023, the company was hit with a €1.2 billion fine (around $1.3 billion) from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which said it failed to comply with a data privacy requirement under the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Meta said it would appeal the ruling.
In 2024, the European Commission levied a roughly €798 million (almost $840 million) fine against the company, alleging it created unfair trading conditions by connecting Facebook Marketplace to its social platform. Meta said it would appeal the decision, and in February, it announced it would allow rival classified ads providers to post on Marketplace.
Kaplan’s comments arrive at a moment of change at Meta, which owns social apps like Facebook and Instagram, as well as the messaging platform Whatsapp. Since Trump was elected, the company tapped Kaplan, who previously served as a Republican strategist, to serve in its top policy role, replacing Nick Clegg.
Meta also adjusted its approach to content moderation in the wake of Trump’s victory, announcing plans to replace third-party fact-checkers with user-generated community notes, similar to what’s been implemented by Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter. Kaplan addressed that shift in his discussion on Sunday.
“People do have different perspectives about what’s misinformation and what’s not,” he said. “The approach that we’re adopting going forward and starting in the US this year is to use the diverse voices that exist on our platform to assess what they’re seeing and provide additional information.”
When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson directed Business Insider to a press release about Kaplan’s appearance. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
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