In 2008 and 2012 FB got praised for being the platform that Obama used to win the elections - I remember multiple articles about it (and someone from the Obama campaign later admitted that they did the same thing that got the CA scandal started). In that period of time there were also multiple newspapers writing that "privacy is dead, and it's a good thing". There was not a lot of discussion about privacy when they bought whatsapp and instagram too, IIRC.

Frankly newspapers really changed idea only after Trump won the elections.

I find somewhat fun that some of the recent news about facebook being evil actually talk a lot about that period (ex: the recent news about the "friendly fraud" class action) and some are the consequences of the (naive, as we a lot of us were at the time - me included!) choices facebook made back them (wanting to be a platform, without really understanding what it meant) before pivoting to the current model (which is AFAIK far more similar to google's).