Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 22

In October 2018, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger both officially stepped down from their roles heading Instagram. While this was done quietly, with polite congratulations and thanks from a range of people, including Mark Zuckerberg, it nevertheless marked a huge shift for Instagram itself, and for the relationship between it and its parent company, Facebook. In interviews following his departure, Systrom was diplomatically quiet on the details, but did concede that ‘No one ever leaves a job because everything’s awesome’, which was widely interpreted to mean the tensions around keeping Instagram independent were too much as Mark Zuckerberg wrestled more and more control away from Systrom and Krieger (Wagner 2018). A cover story for Wired magazine in April 2019 claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had been threatened by Instagram and Kevin Systrom’s success, and Systrom’s obvious appeal to the media. More than that, Zuckerberg had deliberately made it harder for traffic to flow from the main Facebook app to Instagram after he learnt that users were ‘leaking’ away from Facebook to Instagram (Thompson & Vogelstein 2019). Systrom was replaced by Adam Mosseri who was previously the Head of Newsfeed at Facebook, suggesting that Instagram’s direction, and Facebook’s, were going to be much more closely tied in the coming years. However Mosseri’s first six months at Instagram were rocky ones, with revelations about the depth of Instagram as a site of political interference in US elections coming to light, a major scandal in the UK relating to self-harm content on Instagram after the suicide of British teenager Molly Russell, and news of Zuckerberg’s plans to redevelop all the core Facebook apps to integrate messaging across Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.