I frankly think Zuckerberg started out as a “good” guy. When you think about connecting the world it sounded great at the time, what could be better than more contact with more people? Especially when you can make billions of dollars doing it.
Then it turns out that people are horrible and that over-connecting them can be fatally destructive. To deal with his cognitive dissonance at building something of nuclear-weapons-bad level, he became the comic book villain that we know today.
I kind of agree with you. I am still impressed with his commitment to donate his wealth to charity. Facebook may not have started with the best of intentions, or with complete integrity - but that doesn't equal the scale of evil (i.e actual genocide) that Facebook is now responsible for. He just made the same mistake a lot of us also would have made: underestimating humanity's capacity for evil.
That being said, at some point it seems clear that FB internally recognized that FB was being used to support violent authoritarian politics - and the Zuckerberg/Sandberg/Kaplan crowd should be held responsible for that. It is shocking to me how badly they seemed to have acted (and are continuing to act) in response to bad faith political actors, and how much they have torched their own reputation as a result.
Then it turns out that people are horrible and that over-connecting them can be fatally destructive. To deal with his cognitive dissonance at building something of nuclear-weapons-bad level, he became the comic book villain that we know today.