Instagram Reels Copies TikTok, and Is an Example of Everything Wrong With Facebook
The social network giant rolled out a new feature that reveals — again — that company doesn’t get it
By Jason Aten
If the news about TikTok, and the possibility that it might be sold to Microsoft, wasn’t interesting enough, on Wednesday Facebook released a direct competitor to the popular video sharing app called Instagram Reels. A new feature of Instagram that lets you record 15-second videos, set them to music, and share them as an Instagram Story, Reels can also be found in a special section of the Explore tab in the app.
In almost every functional way, Reels is TikTok, but built into Instagram. If Facebook were to buy TikTok from its parent company ByteDance, and integrate it into Instagram as is, it would be this product. Wait, isn’t TikTok on the market right now? Except, of course, Facebook can’t exactly scoop up another young social app while it’s under scrutiny for the other times it did just that.
So, instead, it just knocked it off wholesale.
To be fair, there is one big difference. Instead of the theoretical possibility of your data being collected by China, there’s the absolute certainty that it’s being collected by Facebook.
