One of Facebook’s more salient and successful qualities is the ability to see where things are headed in a big picture sense — perhaps that’s generous, or perhaps it’s what you’d expect from the most pervasive panopticon ever created. They realized early on normal people don’t care about things like privacy online and exploited that to their maximum advantage, for example. It made them wildly successful and largely unassailable.

They’ve finally looked into the fetid swamp of QAnon and decided that being a vector for this insane malignancy of a truly mad age is not a great look. Only three years too late and after this dark conspiracy has become an untamable Lovecraftian horror. But they see there’s a political, if not necessarily cultural, shift and playing along with Trumpism no longer seems like a winning game. Their cowardice and irresponsiblity will haunt us for a long long time.