Facebook veteran takes charge of Instagram

An employee who has worked at Facebook for ten years is put in charge of Instagram. The company has announced that. The two founders of Instagram announced their departure from the social network last week.

The new executive, Adam Mosseri, had been working at Instagram for some time as “vice president of product,” Facebook writes in the announcement. He will report to Chris Cox, the chief executive for products at Facebook and not directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The two founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, announced their departure last week without public statement. That has led to speculation that Systrom and Krieger may be in conflict with Facebook’s leadership. The blog post of Mosseri’s announcement is presumably in the name of Systrom and Krieger to radiate unity to the outside world.

It is not the only departure from a subsidiary of Facebook in recent times. WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton also left the company. Acton recently opened up about his departure from Facebook. The parent company turned out to have different principles about privacy and revenue models for the chat app.

The relationship between Instagram and Facebook was already changing before the departure. For example, Instagram photos on Facebook no longer receive a label that they come from Instagram and Instagram did a test with its own variant of sharing messages, something that has been possible on Facebook for years but which the Instagram founders were completely against.

New Instagram executive Adam Mosseri between founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger