Three days after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg was asked the question on many people’s minds: Did the explosion of fake news and caustic political rhetoric on Facebook help Trump win? Zuckerberg dismissed the idea. "The idea that fake news … influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said. The line has been reprinted so frequently, many can cite it from memory.

It didn't matter whether his comments were willful or accidental. The world asked, “How could someone so rich and powerful be so out of touch, and not appreciate the impact Facebook had on the election?” And Zuckerberg didn’t have a good answer. He and Facebook have been scrambling to repair their reputations ever since.

For a while, it looked like they would never figure it out. Russia's manipulation of News Feed made them look negligent. The Cambridge Analytica scandal made them look reckless and greedy. But Zuckerberg kept pledging to spend as much as it took to make things right. He said he understood that Facebook needed to exert more oversight over what appears on its platform. And by the beginning of 2019, it was starting to look like he was getting traction—that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger were becoming safer, more responsible platforms for their users.

That hope took a body blow in the past two weeks. In his recent appearances, Zuckerberg doesn’t sound like a changed man at all. In a speech at Georgetown, his testimony to Congress, and his insistence that Facebook will allow politicians to run false ads, Zuckerberg has reignited the fights that followed Trump's election. At the end of 2016, we worried about how Facebook had become a cesspool of lies, bigotry, and hate, skewing election results in pursuit of profits. We’re having the same conversation today.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is still lecturing us with the sophistication of a college student about the importance of free speech in politics. And he's showing up in public forums like Congress woefully unprepared—or unwilling—to answer the obvious questions about those views. Why couldn’t he answer the simplest questions about his position on false ads from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last week? It wasn't a trick question. It was the same question that had been in the news for two weeks before Zuckerberg appeared in Congress.

Zuckerberg is still pushing the utopian view about news and information as when he started Facebook 15 years ago: Voters and citizens can figure out for themselves what is true and what is false. They can distinguish between a news story and an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, or a screed in Breitbart versus a news story in The New York Times. Society has much bigger problems when mainstream media has control of the conversation, he believes.

Read the transcript of Zuckerberg’s recent speech at Georgetown—or his appearance just after the election three years ago, or a decade ago—and they all make the same point: "People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world—a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences," he said at Georgetown on October 17.

That may have sounded grand a decade ago when Facebook was a scrappy startup trying to knock Google from its perch. The "important consequences" included revolutions like the Arab Spring. But Zuckerberg isn't leading a revolution against "the man" anymore. He is "the man."