The great American tech companies shuffled into Davos last week. They wanted to talk about human rights, empathy, kids, their profound respect for European politicians — anything but the kind of disruption and growth that any other executives would be touting, and that Donald Trump sold from the big stage.

“You’re looking at a somewhat humbled tech presence,” eBay CEO Devin Wenig told me after one of about a thousand World Economic Forum panels touching on how the field of artificial intelligence could avoid developing the toxic reputation of other recent tech innovations.

Humbled, with a single exception: Facebook. While Uber’s new CEO completed an apology tour and Google’s chief practically begged for higher taxes, the social media giant was strikingly, jarringly apart from the pack: ideological about the power of its algorithms over human judgment and wholly committed to continued, rolling disruption.

“It is not about stability,” one of its top executives, Elliot Schrage, told me. “Stability is actually damaging to us.”

Facebook’s defiant optimism may be a feature of its history. But it feels like a major gamble in this new regulatory moment. European regulators — never shy — are now militant. They have already imposed the “right to be forgotten,” which went from a kind of a curiosity in Silicon Valley to a major compliance task and, increasingly, cultural norm. Germany has begun to enforce its NetzDG law against hate speech. And the General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect this year, includes an effort to impose what is sometimes called “algorithmic accountability.” There’s a provision that provides for the “right to an explanation” if you believe you’ve been harmed by an algorithm, something that could impose serious constraints, and unwanted transparency, on any company that has machines making choices.

Microsoft learned to take government seriously in Washington in the late 1990s, Google in Brussels in the 2000s. Facebook is still at the beginning of that cycle, seeking more to change the subject than to reshape its ideology or leadership. And while it’s become a kind of insider conventional wisdom that the younger company hasn’t learned from the older ones’ mistakes, it’s not really all that clear how they can avoid the backlash.

Meanwhile Facebook’s peers have pivoted hard into the new tech politics. And the leading face of this new approach is Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. Unlike the leaders of the new wave of tech giants, he’s a traditional American executive — a skilled politician with high emotional intelligence, not a boy genius engineer who built the thing he runs. And he is methodically making the obvious political moves. He told me he spent much of the week in Davos meeting with heads of state on what sounded like an apology tour.

His message: “That we’ve learned from the missteps of the past and we're a new company, and we believe that growth and partnership is more lasting, and we want to start to have a dialogue with you, and we're going to push you, and we expect you to push back.”

Khosrowshahi is trying to fix the brand from the damage done to the brand by a management team that became famous for its dirty tricks against regulators and rivals, a misogynistic internal culture, and even, notoriously, launching a private investigation into a woman who reported being raped by a driver. And Khosrowshahi is trying to open markets — from the UK to Italy — where regulators beat back Uber’s first cowboy wave.