Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a favorite punching bag of both the left and right. Over the course of the 2010s, he became an important funder of liberal causes, which earned him the perpetual ire of Republicans—even as Facebook itself remained a vital source of web traffic for right-of-center news sites.
Then, in 2016, Donald Trump got elected president, and progressives eventually landed on It's Facebook's fault as their preferred explanation for how this could have happened. It became commonplace to see mainstream headlines explicitly blaming Zuckerberg for allowing his social media site to platform and advertise Republican messaging. (Eight years prior, when Barack Obama successfully used Facebook to reach voters—including by hiring Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to do digital outreach for the campaign—no one in the media had any problem with this. After it became apparent that non-Democrats could use Facebook, too, Hughes suddenly started advocating a breakup of the company.)
When Democrats seized upon the (now thoroughly debunked) notion that Russian ads and bots on Facebook had swung the election to Trump, the anti-Facebook fever pitch reached its apex. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg had not exactly endeared himself to Republicans: Developments in 2020 and 2021 further enraged the right, as the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 pandemic produced moderation decisions that conservatives correctly despised. This was the moment of greatest danger for Zuckerberg: Principled libertarian defenders of free markets were in retreat, and rising populism on both the left and right had threatened to make antitrust a reality for Facebook.
