August 4, 2022: -Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is migrating from San Francisco to London to promote parent firm Meta’s purpose of luring users away from TikTok as it is wrestling with a recession in users.

This year, Mosseri choice move to London, and the move will be temporary, a Meta spokesperson said.

London is Meta’s significant engineering hub outside the U.S., with over 4,000 employees, which include a dedicated Instagram product team and roles which are focusing on developing services for creators. It’s where the party’s Workplace messaging app was preferably developed.

Meta said Mosseri would assist the company’s creative team on the ground in London, focusing on helping certain users make money from their posts and countering the rapid increase of TikTok. The company tries to reposition itself as a group of platforms enabling e-commerce in an online universe known as the “metaverse” instead of simply a tool for advertisers to target people digitally.

Meta is discovering it hard to convince investors of its pivot to the metaverse, with shares of the company slumping more sharply than Big Tech peer Alphabet between a broader downturn in tech stocks and as its apps lose ground to Chinese-owned TikTok. The firm reported its first-ever revenue decline in the second quarter and gave weak guidance for the following quarter. Its push into the metaverse has proven costly, with the virtual reality division losing $2.8 billion in the three months to June.

To counter TikTok’s wild growth, Meta has sought to mimic the platform with tweaks to its apps, including creating its short-video feature called “Reels.” The company even produced controversial changes to Instagram, prioritizing algorithmically generated content over posts from friends. The move led to a backlash from users, including Kim Kardashian.

Mosseri’s move could be considered an attempt to charm regulators in the U.K. The government wants to grant the media watchdog Ofcom more powers to police Instagram and other social media platforms through a new law named the Online Safety Bill. However, the bill’s progress has been thrown into chaos because of the concession of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the subsequent search for a new leader.