Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth Appointed Facebook’s New CTO

In a rare shake-up of Facebook’s highest ranks, the company will shuffle chief technology officers next year. On Wednesday, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth was appointed Facebook’s chief technology officer. He’ll replace current CTO Mike Schroepfer, who told Facebook on Monday of his plans to resign in 2022, just days after WSJ published an explosive series of articles painting a picture of a company that consistently minimizes its troubles in pursuit of growth.

Andrew Bosworth, the veteran Facebook executive, found himself in the headlines in 2018 over some impolitic statements he made in an internal memo leaked to Buzzfeed News. In it, he defended Facebook’s growth-at-all-costs management style championed by his boss, Mark Zuckerberg.

“Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies,” Bosworth wrote, dismissing the dark side of Facebook’s mission to connect people online. “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.” The good connections that Facebook enables, he said, far outweigh the bad.

Whatever, the case, Bosworth’s style is in sharp contrast to Schroepfer’s, who was known to give emotional media interviews expressing dismay over misinformation and toxic content on Facebook. He also discussed the struggle to create A.I. that could keep up and automatically remove the deluge of offensive posts on Facebook.

Schroepfer’s reputation was at least somewhat different inside the company. On Twitter, Samidh Chakrabarti, the man who ran one of the Facebook teams chiefly responsible for policing misinformation until this month, wrote this about Schroepfer’s departure, referring to him by his nickname, Schrep:

Now with Bosworth becoming CTO, Zuckerberg has installed a loyal soldier to oversee his company’s huge data-driven social network that powers a lucrative online ad business. Bosworth will also play a key role in Facebook’s attempts to build a consumer hardware business, expand into virtual reality, improve artificial intelligence, and, presumably, combat misinformation and toxic posts.

Bosworth had been concentrating on Facebook’s hardware business—its Portal video-chat tablet and VR headsets—and recently took charge of Facebook’s efforts to develop a metaverse, a more immersive digital world that’s become a top focus for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “This is all foundational to our broader efforts helping to build the metaverse, and I’m excited about the future of this work under Boz’s leadership,” Zuckerberg says in a press release announcing the changes.

Bosworth and Zuckerberg are long-time compatriots. They met at Harvard when Zuckerberg took a computer science class where Bosworth served as a teaching fellow. (“Facebook came out on February 12, which was two weeks after finals ended… so he was clearly working on Facebook instead of studying for my class,” Bosworth recounted to a Harvard interviewer.) After a stint at Microsoft, Bosworth joined Facebook in 2006 as one of its first engineers. He built many of Facebook’s initial products, nearly all of which still form the app’s underpinning: NewsFeed, Messenger, and Groups.

When he began at Facebook, the site had 5 million users, roughly a quarter of 1% of Facebook’s current rolls. At the start, he told the Harvard interviewer, “we all built a ton of different features all the time. We were constantly thinking of things we’d like to try, and some of them worked and some didn’t.”