Great! Does that mean the Facebook founder and CEO is also done with censorship based on politics, too?

Perhaps, although the topic barely comes up in this New York Times report on Mark Zuckerberg's sharp reversal on political engagement. It mentions his letter to Congress expressing his regret over having caved to "pressure" from the federal government to intervening in discussions and debate over COVID-19 policies. As I noted at the time, though, Zuckerberg didn't couple that regret with disclosures of the correspondence from the government's censorship campaign, as Elon Musk did immediately after buying Twitter.

That doesn't mean he doesn't have regrets -- more than a few, apparently:

As recently as June at the Allen and Company conference — the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho — Mr. Zuckerberg complained to multiple people about the blowback to Meta that came from the more politically touchy aspects of his philanthropic efforts. And he regretted hiring employees at his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left on some causes.

In short — he was over it.

His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all.

In public, that means Mr. Zuckerberg is declining to engage with Washington except when necessary. In private, he has stopped supporting programs at his philanthropy that could be perceived as partisan, and he has tamped down employee activism at Meta, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so or did not want to jeopardize their relationships with Mr. Zuckerberg.

Is he just declaring himself a conscientious objector, or has he changed sides? The censorship battle seems to have had an effect on Zuckerberg's view of politics -- as did ongoing battles with erstwhile allies in the progressive movement. But the riots on college campuses aimed at the Jews seem to have been the biggest catalyst for Zuckerberg's lurch to the right:

Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now considers his personal politics to be more like libertarianism or “classical liberalism,” according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulation that restricts business, an embrace of free markets and globalism and an openness to social-justice reforms — but only if it stops short of what he considers far-left progressivism. And Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, have been privately aghast about what they see as a rise of antisemitism on college campuses, including at their alma mater, Harvard.

That certainly would explain an evolution away from progressivism. At the very least, those riots and campus intimidation campaigns exposed the hard-Left for what it truly is, and Zuckerberg would hardly be alone in recognizing that. Fellow Harvard alum and billionaire Bill Ackman has gone through a similar process of disillusionment with both Harvard and the Left, and unlike Zuckerberg, has actively campaigned against it. (And has paid a price for doing so too, which Zuckerberg may have also noted.)

One name is conspicuously absent from this report, though: Arabella. Along with other uber-wealthy figures, Zuckerberg contributed significantly to this dark-money progressive slush fund, which Scott Walter covered in his book earlier this year, ARABELLA: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America. Has Zuckerberg renounced that as well? If so, good; if not, then perhaps his political shift is less than sincere, or at least less than strongly felt. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Arabella, we may not ever really know the answer to that question.

However, let's not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Just the fact that Zuckerberg feels the need to renounce some of his earlier activism is a good sign about the direction of the political culture at the moment. If he's not putting his platform at the mercy of government censors any longer, that's also good progress, even though full disclosure of past correspondence would accelerate accountability for the abuses of the past three years. I'll take that over the alternative in this cycle.