The government already knew about ZLib, they were just holding off until the amount of pressure to act on all of these lawsuits got to a certain point and said fuck it, we going in for the kill bois. They even know about LibGen, but what I also think made it worse is when ZLib started imposing daily limits and having people "donate" money in order to increase said limits. I know hosting all of that content doesn't come free, but when there's money involved and a bunch of angry authors hurting because they are losing out on revenue, shit will get the attention of the feds one way or the other. Social Media only brought more attention to the site and at that point, the feds had to step in, and claim some sort of victory over "piracy". They do this shit constantly now and while I dislike TikTok, it really only drove the final nail into ZLib's coffin.