Meta Policy Chief Monika Bickert to Leave Company, Join Harvard Law as Visiting Professor

Meta’s longtime head of global policy management Monika L. Bickert will leave the company to join Harvard Law School as a visiting professor this fall.

Bickert — who graduated from HLS in 2000 — announced her departure in an internal message on Friday, writing that she had long been interested in teaching. She will serve a one-year stint as the Steven and Maureen Klinsky Visiting Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress, HLS spokesperson Jeff Neal confirmed Sunday.

The Klinsky Professorship, the first endowed professorship of practice at HLS, is designed to bring leaders from fields beyond law to campus. It was most recently held by Elizabeth M. B. Prelogar, the former U.S. Solicitor General under the Biden administration, and has previously been held by former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro and former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius R. Genachowski.

Bickert did not respond to a request for comment.

As Meta’s vice president of content policy since 2013, Bickert oversaw the rules regarding what billions of users can post across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. A former federal prosecutor, she joined the company in 2012 following 11 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

Her departure comes days after Meta suffered major setbacks in two lawsuits over the safety of its platforms.

Jurors in Santa Fe determined Tuesday that Meta has misled users by exposing children to sexually explicit material and sexual predators, while a Los Angeles jury found Wednesday that Meta — along with Google’s YouTube — had negligently and intentionally created addictive social media platforms to harm a plaintiff’s health.

HLS lecturer Leah A. Plunkett ’01, a faculty associate for the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, wrote in a statement that she was “delighted” with Bickert’s new HLS appointment, saying she worked with her on a mock seminar during a class reunion last year.

“Monika brought invaluable insights from the practice perspective, and we’re so lucky that we’ll have the benefit of her expertise and skills on the faculty next year as the legal landscape around digital life and law evolves at breakneck speed,” she wrote.

It is unclear what classes Bickert will teach at HLS. The HLS course catalog for next year has not yet been published.

Bickert is no stranger to the HLS classroom. She taught a class in 2019 called “Social Media and the Law,” which covered hate speech, terror, propaganda, and misinformation. During that same semester, Bickert testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on Meta’s efforts to identify and regulate extremist content on its platforms.

“It is actually very difficult for people who haven’t worked in the trenches to understand just how hard this stuff is,” HLS professor Rebecca L. Tushnet ’95 said.

Tushnet described Bickert’s role as involving “billions of decisions,” which she said could prepare her to contribute a realistic view of what social media regulation might look like in an academic setting.

But Bickert’s tenure at Meta has not been without controversy.

Whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen came forward with internal documents in 2021 accusing the company of harming children and failing to stop the spread of extremism and misinformation in favor of profit.

Bickert pushed back in a pair of 2021 interviews with NPR and Fox News, arguing that “our business interest is making sure that people have a good experience” and that Haugen had not worked in the specific areas the leaked documents addressed.

“As tempting as it may be to want to blame social media or Facebook for issues like polarization, I think we as a society have to look deeper if we want to solve those issues,” Bickert said at the time.

When Meta announced plans in 2019 to shift to end-to-end encrypted messaging, Bickert expressed hesitation about endorsing the move, citing concerns about the company’s ability to address terrorism and child exploitation, according to court filings released during the New Mexico trial.

Under Bickert’s stewardship, Meta has also made several changes to its content practices. Both Facebook and Instagram shifted away from fact-checking to a community notes model, and the company announced plans in January 2025 to phase in personalized political content and significantly scale back its content removal enforcement.

Tushnet said that as courts begin to hold tech companies accountable for the design of their platforms, Bickert’s first-hand experience crafting content policy could offer students a perspective that pure academics cannot.

“I wish both could lose. I think we are blaming social media for a lot of things that are wrong with the world. At the same time, Meta has made a lot of bad decisions,” Tushnet said.

“Although people who come from the industry can have views that are shaped by that industry, that doesn’t mean they’re always shaped in one direction, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be hearing them out,” she added.

—Staff writer Uy B. Pham can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ubp.88. Follow him on X @uybpham.

—Staff writer Sierra R. Pape can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @SierraRPape.