This is an opinion column.

The tech giants of Silicon Valley have found their means of survival not in the foundational lines of code beneath their empires but in the fine print of their social contract with America. You must follow their rules, but they may change at will.

Didn’t you read the user agreement?

Seemingly overnight, Facebook — which insists on being called Meta now — swapped out its political identity more swiftly than its name. The world’s largest social media company announced it would suspend fact-checking, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “biased” and prone to mistakes. Zuck did not cite examples, nor weigh any errors against the good that fact-checking may have done. Instead, he cited his opinion as a fact. And who will be left at the company to fact-check him?

In its place, Meta — nee, Facebook — will deploy community comments, much like X — nee, Twitter — has already done. It’s a move that required so much thought, Zuck doesn’t seem to have told developers at his own company before he told the world. As the Verge reports, the community comments feature wasn’t on Meta’s development roadmap until last week and the company has said it won’t be ready for months.

Until then, it’s up to you, the individual user, to discern Russian trolls from AI-generated slop.

Facebook’s internal memos, leaked to the so-called legacy media, show the company will now allow for a certain degree of hate speech, too. Not only may you now say things that are blatantly false, you may also say those things about Mexicans, queer people, or the least-favored minority of your choosing.

The company that promised to move fast and break things will no longer be deterred by a little genocide in Myanmar, lynchings in India or increased risk of suicide among young women.

Nor does the company extend its protections to its own employees. At the same time the company has removed the safeties from its online platforms, it has tinkered with its employee handbook and removed tampons in the bathrooms for trans employees.

This is not a change in policy, but a change in culture. And Facebook is not alone. Throughout the country, the only thing being canceled in corporate culture is DEI.

You might think this is all well and good, but keep in mind what can change once, can change again. And again. And again. It may change so often and so swiftly, that it never means anything — not now, not before, not later.

I’ve written before about the phenomenon of political shapeshifters — candidates and elected officials who swap out their so-called principles as easily as changing clothes. When watching such people, it’s natural — but wrong — to ask which contradictory position was the real one: what they said before or what they’re doing today? Which discrete thing did they ever believe?

The answer is neither.

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Shapeshifters don’t change based on new evidence or a stronger argument. Rather, they do so for someone’s approval.

Among politicians, it’s voters.

Among corporations, it used to be shareholders. But I’m not so sure anymore. Just look at Meta and its CEO.

Since Donald Trump has threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg already, Zuck has traveled twice to meet with him at Mar-a-Lago.

Since those meetings began, Zuckerberg changed his company’s direction.

In short, he’s afraid, as is every other billionaire shapeshifter who has bent the knee of late.

Zuckerberg can opine about masculine energy with Joe Rogan and cosplay as an MMA fighter in his free time, but the moment Mister Babyhands threatened to lay a finger on him, he buckled like an overcooked noodle.

What are we to learn from this? Something old and perhaps something new, at least new to us.

First, corporations do not have beliefs, only positions — and those positions may change without warning to suit their interests. When a company says on its Instagram feed that Black lives matter or that queer people deserve fair treatment, that’s not a statement of principle. It’s marketing.

Nothing especially new there, nor anything that should have surprised us.

But these sudden shifts could foretell something bigger happening in our country, something that should concern us.

It wasn’t that long ago that China was poised to overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy. Meanwhile, Russia sat on natural resources suitable to fuel an empire.

But as President Xi Jinping consolidated power, Chinese corporate executives have vanished overnight, and in Russia, private jets sometimes fall conspicuously from the sky. These are not safe places to do business, and the economies of these countries have suffered for it.

We may say nothing like that could happen here, but to a small degree, it already has.

What we should worry about is not that so many companies, CEOs or multi-billionaire founders are suddenly shifting their so-called principles, but what might have happened to them if they didn’t.

Zuck says he’s prioritizing freedom. He means his.

As for yours and mine? Perhaps it’s time we read that user agreement again.