In the days and hours leading up to Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday, the consensus was clear: This was not going to go well. “The poor guy is going to be walking into an ambush,” The Cook Political Report’s Charlie Cook told NBC News. “I mean this is going to be like Custer’s Last Stand. I mean this is going to be Little Big Horn.” Writing in The Atlantic, Franklin Foer predicted a historic shift: “Tomorrow will be the day Zuckerberg raises his hand before Congress, and it will be the day Silicon Valley no longer floats above the world.” Axios even released a list of the senators who were most likely to eviscerate the Facebook CEO.

Hauling Zuckerberg before Congress was the culmination of a monthslong reevaluation of Big Tech in Washington D.C. on both sides of the aisle. His earlier media appearances to do damage control on the Cambridge Analytica scandal—in which tens of millions of Facebook users’ private data had been compromised—had been sweaty and awkward, with Zuckerberg clearly rattled by the severity of the backlash.



But after hours of testimony on Tuesday, Zuckerberg and his shareholders were likely breathing a sigh of relief. Little Big Horn this was not; rather, it was as if an errant yet gifted student had been hauled before the principal. With some exceptions, legislators kept their gloves on. Regulation, according to the majority of senators on the committees, would be an action of last resort. And if it was undertaken in the near term, it would be done with Facebook’s consultation. There was an implicit threat in the proceedings—if Facebook messed up again it would be in deep trouble!—but there was an abiding sense that, while a shift is underway in tech policy, Zuckerberg and his company were getting off with a warning for now.



Zuckerberg has a long history of skating past controversy. At Harvard, after he illicitly obtained photos of female students to build a program that would allow others to rank them by “hotness,” he was hauled before a disciplinary committee to explain himself. There he apologized—and chastised Harvard for its lack of digital security. He got off with limited repercussions.



“Frankly, Mark’s social awkwardness—and his confusion over the response to Facemash—had been his greatest defense,” writes Ben Mezrich in The Accidental Billionaires. “The gathered deans had looked at him and listened to his stilted affectation, and they had realized that Mark really wasn’t a bad kid—he just didn’t think the same way other kids did. He hadn’t realized that girls were going to get mad because guys were voting on their appearance.”

