In the months after the Instagram founders left, their app was rebranded as “Instagram from Facebook.” The group in charge of Instagram’s direct messaging was transferred to report to the Facebook Messenger team. In late 2019, Zuckerberg made a cameo appearance at an Instagram-branded conference and took a selfie with the crowd. Internally at Facebook, he was talking about using Instagram to take on TikTok, the Chinese app that had replaced Snapchat as the top threat to Facebook’s dominance.
