By Instagram speaks out after Kylie Jenner slams them for ‘copying’ TikTok
Kylie Jenner has joined the millions of Instagram users who have criticised the social media site for rolling out a change that makes it comparable to TikTok.
The 24-year-old posted a message to her 360 million followers stating “Make Instagram Instagram Again” complaining about the platform’s new focus on video.
“Stop trying to be TikTok, I just want to see cute photos of my friends,” the post said.
Her sister, Kim Kardashian who has 326 million followers, shared the exact post on her Instagram Story, alongside the caption, “PRETTY PLEASE.”
After Jenner tweeted that she didn’t use Snapchat anymore after the app’s redesign in 2018, its stock quickly tumbled more than 8% that day. The estimated loss at the time was over $1 billion in market value.
Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri released a video on both Instagram and Twitter to address the backlash.
“We’re experimenting with a number of different changes to the app, and so we’re hearing a lot of concerns from all of you,” he said in a video posted on the app.I want to be clear, it’s not yet good. And we’re going to have to get it to a good place if we’re going to ship it to the rest of the Instagram community.”
“I want to be clear. We’re going to continue to support photos,’ he added. “It’s part of our heritage. That said, I need to be honest. I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing. We see this even if you just look at chronological feed.”
Instagram is now replicating TikTok’s algorithmically suggested main feed, and Meta is pushing “reels,” which are short videos in the style of TikTok content.
According to Cloudflare, a web security and performance company, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app of 2021. The video platform surpassed three platforms owned by Meta.
(Image: GettyImages)
Written by: Tahsin Aktar
