I would say it changed after 2016, the Brexit vote and Trump winning the presidency seemed to signal to the big social media companies that they needed to make

I would say it changed after 2016, the Brexit vote and Trump winning the presidency seemed to signal to the big social media companies that they needed to make changes, and this spread to many other sites too, perhaps with social momentum or perhaps simply because Google or Facebook et al can limit a site's audience if it won't act in a certain way.