Finally, Mark Zuckerberg can do whatever he wants, as opposed to the past 20 years, where it’s hard to argue that he’s faced an unrelenting series of punishments. Zuckerberg’s net worth recently hit $213 billion, he’s running a company with a market capitalization of over $1.5 trillion that he can never be fired from, he owns a 1400-acre compound in Hawaii, and while dealing with all this abject suffering, he was forced to half-heartedly apologize during a senate hearing where he was tortured (translation: made to feel slightly uncomfortable) after only having six years to recover from the last time when nothing happened to him in a senate hearing.

Sarcasm aside, few living people have had it easier than Mark Zuckerberg, a man who has been insulated from consequence, risk, and responsibility for nearly twenty years. The sudden (and warranted) hysteria around these monstrous changes has an air of surprise, framing Meta (and Zuckerberg’s) moves as a “MAGA-tilt” to “please Donald Trump,” which I believe is a comfortable way to frame a situation that is neither sudden nor surprising.

Mere months ago, the media was fawning over Mark Zuckerberg’s new look, desperate to hear about why he’s wearing gold chains, declaring that he had “the swagger of a Roman emperor” and that he had (and I quote the Washington Post) transformed himself from “a dorky, democracy-destroying CEO into a dripped-out, jacked AI accelerationist in the eyes of potential Meta recruits.” Zuckerberg was, until this last week, being celebrated for the very thing people are upset about right now — flimsy, self-conscious and performative macho bullshit that only signifies strength to weak men and those credulous enough to accept it, which in this case means “almost every major media outlet.” The only thing he did differently this time was come out and say it. After all, there was no punishment or judgment for his last macho media cycle, and if anything he proved that many will accept whatever he says in whatever way he does it.

Meta hasn’t “made a right-wing turn.” It’s been an active arm of the right wing media for nearly a decade, actively empowering noxious demagogues like Alex Jones, allowing him to evade bans and build massive private online groups on the platform to disseminate content. A report from November 2021 by Media Matters found that Facebook had tweaked its news algorithm in 2021, helping right-leaning news and politics pages to outperform other pages using “sensational and divisive content.” Another Media Matters report from 2023 found that conservatives were continually earning more total interactions than left or non-aligned pages between January 1 2020 and December 31 2022, even as the company was actively deprioritizing political content.

A 2024 report from non-profit GLAAD found that Meta had continually allowed widespread anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, with the company either claiming that the content didn’t violate its community standards or ignoring reports entirely. While we can — and should — actively decry Meta’s disgusting new standards, it’s ahistorical to pretend that this was a company that gave a shit about any of this stuff, or took it seriously, or sought to protect marginalized people.