• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 11, 2020

A few months and a year following his departure from Facebook, Chris Cox is returning as its chief product officer.

"Cox's return is a seismic event for Facebook," observes NBC News' Dylan Byers. "He was instrumental in developing News Feed and, in his final year, oversaw the family of apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. He is also one of Mark Zuckerberg's closest confidants."

Facebook co-founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Cox's exit last year was related to Zuckerberg's decision to take the company in a new, privacy-focused direction. (Chris Daniels, vice president at WhatsApp, left at the same time for similar reasons, according to Zuckerberg.)

Yet, as the country lurches from one crisis to another, Cox says in a new post that returning to Facebook puts him in the best position to effect positive change. “2020 refocused us all, on a public-health crisis, an economic crisis, and now a reckoning of racial injustice,” he explains, adding: “Facebook and our products have never been more relevant to our future.”

For his part, Zuckerberg enthused on Thursday: “I’m really excited Chris is coming back to Facebook!”

One of Facebook’s first engineers, Cox had been with the company for more than a decade before leaving in March 2019. After helping to build the company's original News Feed and shepherding its core apps through one iteration after another, he became chief product officer in 2014. Prior to his departure last year, he had been tasked with overseeing the company’s entire apps division as part of a major reorganization.

Zuckerberg has maintained that Facebook has no other choice but to push further into private messaging. “The future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services, where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever,” he said last year. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”

Also on Thursday, Facebook named Maxine Williams as its chief diversity officer. Williams will report directly to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO. 

“Maxine is a lawyer by training, who represented workers in trade unions and ran a multi-country human-rights network,” Sandberg wrote on Thursday. “She stands up for what she believes in, both inside and outside Facebook.”