Facebook is implementing a massive product reorganization

Facebook instituted its biggest executive shakeup in its 15-year history this week, appointing new leaders for WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook’s core app while giving other longtime Facebook executives new responsibilities, including a new effort to tackle blockchain technology.

The moves, which were announced internally to employees today, are meant to improve executive communication and user privacy, but the changes also come as Facebook contends with the backlash from the U.S. presidential election, revelations of manipulation by the Russian government and the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Just one week after WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum said he was leaving the company, Facebook announced his replacement: Chris Daniels will take over as the new VP of WhatsApp. He’s the Facebook product executive who has been running Internet.org, the company’s effort to bring free internet services to the masses.

Daniels has been with Facebook for more than seven years, and while he hasn’t worked on WhatsApp previously, the kind of stuff he has worked on has a lot of relevance.

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went to Hawaii late last year while on paternity leave, photographers for the Daily Mail went into full paparazzi mode to capture the billionaire’s trip to a local burger joint.

There were pics of Mark Zuckerberg with a training toilet for his daughter. Mark Zuckerberg with a backpack. Mark Zuckerberg smiling, holding shave ice. In many of the photos, Zuckerberg was seen walking with a man the publication identified only as “a male friend.”

What is the blockchain? And how should Facebook be using it?

Finding answers to those questions is now the responsibility of David Marcus, the Facebook executive who has, until this week, been running the company’s standalone messaging app, Messenger.

Facebook has been promising everyone that it’s going to take user privacy more seriously.

Part of that is because of Cambridge Analytica and the widespread backlash from users and regulators following the realization that people’s Facebook data was walking out the door without their knowledge or permission. Part of it is because Facebook has to get more serious about privacy thanks to upcoming data regulation in Europe, known as the GDPR.