Instagram charges against TikTok launching Reels

Written by Aurora Maciá

TikTok’s dizzying success may have been just the chronicle of a death foretold.

Instagram yesterday launched Reels exclusively in Brazil, a new feature that closely copies the music video format introduced by Musical.ly and inherited by TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance. Threatened in the face of Tiktok’s growing audience (some 1.5 billion users per month), Instagram has reloaded the gun with the same formula it used to take down Snapchat.

Reels will have a chance to go viral by appearing in the “Top reels” of the Explore section. The user can also share them with just one user or with our closest friends (something that Tiktok did not allow and that may encourage the more embarrassed to join this trend).

How will the Reels work?

As reported by Techcrunch, Reels will work in much the same way as TikToks: users will select it as an additional shooting mode alongside Boomerang and Superzoom and will be able to choose to record silently, borrow audio from another video or choose a popular song. Instagram wants to encourage remixing and creativity, and to that end it relies on Facebook’s large music library, where users will be able to search for a song by title or singer or browse the “Popular,” “Mood” and “Genre” tabs. Reels will be more editable than Stories recorded in normal mode, with options to record in slow motion and speed up playback afterwards (so characteristic of Tiktok) or use text as an element of the meme or scene.

Does Reels mean the death of TikTok?

As of today, it is very difficult to know if the large TikTok community will abandon this social network to share their videos on Instagram Reels. The character and tone of the two networks is actually very different, as Instagram users tend to be more concerned with keeping up appearances (sharing carefully curated content, always showing the best moments) while Tiktokers are not afraid to make a fool of themselves (memes, dances, bad jokes, etc.). However, it appears that Instagram is going to have quite a bit of support, especially from the U.S. government. Concerned about the rise of TikTok, the U.S. government has launched an investigation to find out whether China censors the content shown to U.S. users and to analyze how it uses its members’ data.

Moreover, just look at what happened to Snapchat: the network began its downfall by losing 3 million users from the first to the second quarter of 2018. We will have to see if TikTok is able to respond to Instagram’s attack with some new attractive proposition for users or if we will soon attend its funeral.