
On Feb. 4, 2004, Facebook (Meta (META)) was born out of a Harvard dorm room. Originally known as thefacebook.com and initially available only to students at select universities, the social media platform was co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew Mccollum and Chris Hughes. Flash forward 21 years, and a lot has changed, including its name. Known as Meta today, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram (META) and WhatsApp is one the world’s most valuable public companies with a market cap of more than $1.7 trillion. Its enduring success has made Zuckerberg, the sole co-founder still serving as a Meta executive, the world’s third wealthiest person with a net worth of nearly $242 billion.
Zuckerberg, 40, serves as both CEO and board chairman of Meta, giving him extensive control over setting company-wide values. From pivoting on issues like privacy and misinformation to redirecting Meta’s support for various politicians, the company’s switches have been occasionally dramatic and largely informed by its leader.
Here’s a look back at how Meta’s values, political stances and relationships with governments have changed over the past 21 years:
Attempts to woo China
Since 2009, Facebook has been banned in China—something Zuckerberg spent much of the 2010s lobbying to change. The billionaire for years attempted to convince regulators to let Facebook back in, visiting the country on numerous occasions and even picking up Mandarin.
By 2017, Zuckerberg had traveled to China seven times in five years to meet with political figures like Liu Yunshan, China’s former propaganda chief, and President Xi Jinping. The year prior, he posted a photo of himself taking a morning jog through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in what some viewed as an attempt to curry favor with the government.
But by 2019, Zuckerberg appeared to have largely given up on his efforts. During a public address at Georgetown University that year, he singled out China for cracking down on free expression and said he was no longer interested in expanding Meta’s services to the country. “We could never come to an agreement on what it will take for us to operate there,” conceded Zuckerberg. “And they never let us in.”
A privacy reckoning
Meta has long been plagued by privacy debacles. In 2018, it notably faced its largest scandal to date when various reports exposed Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm, as having collected data from some 87 million Facebook users that was later used to aid Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign.
Zuckerberg, who in 2010 had declared that privacy was no longer “a social norm,” changed his tune in 2019 following a buildup of privacy-related controversies. Laying out a new vision for Meta in a lengthy blog post that detailed plans to embrace private interactions, encryption, reduced permanence and secure data storage, the CEO noted that “a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms.” Since then, the company has invested $8 billion into the six-year-old privacy overhaul, the company said.
Back and forth (and back again) on free speech
In November 2016, Zuckerberg said Meta should be cautious about “becoming arbiters of truth.” But two months later, after facing widespread criticism that misinformation on platforms like Facebook played a role in the 2016 election, the company announced a rollout of fact-checking tools that included tapping third-party organizations in an effort to curb false posts.
This system came to an end in January of this year, when Zuckerberg revealed that, among other changes, Meta would end its nine-year-old fact-checking system and replace it with X-style community notes. Describing the move as a return “to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” the CEO noted it was influenced by Trump’s 2024 win, which feels “like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing free speech.”
A temporary retreat from politics
For the past few years, both Meta and Zuckerberg himself have attempted to step away from politics. In 2021 and in response to user feedback asking for less political content, Meta began testing ways to reduce political posts across Facebook—an approach that was later extended to platforms like Instagram and Threads. Zuckerberg, too, distanced himself politically. In a 2024 letter to the House Judiciary Committee, he detailed his goal to “be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or to even appear to be playing a role” when it comes to presidential elections.
This is no longer the case. Meta, which in December of 2024 donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, is making a return to “civic content,” said Zuckerberg in his January post. “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now,” he explained.
Courting the Trump administration
In recent weeks, Zuckerberg has publicly cozied up to the Trump administration. Besides attending Trump’s inauguration and paying visits to Mar-a-Lago, he’s introduced company-wide changes many perceive as catering to the President.
Alongside putting an end to its fact-checking system, Meta in January dismantled many of its DEI programs and pulled back on censorship across its platforms. Content policies have also been loosened on topics like immigration and gender, which Zuckerberg has described as “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
In a recent company meeting, the Meta CEO reportedly defended his strengthened relationship with the Trump administration as “fundamental” to aiding Meta’s business. “I want to be clear, after the last several years, we now have an opportunity to take a productive partnership with the United States government,” he said. “We’re going to take that.”