The say that capitalism breeds innovation, but as social media popularity persists into the 2020’s, nothing gets the free market moving like the TikTok-ification of Facebook or the Snapchat-ification of Instagram. In our present day, social media companies appear to be less interested in innovating, and more interested in Frankenstein-ing. Over the last decade, some of the most popular social media apps have blatantly ripped off features from some of the other most popular social media apps, in a tech version of Capture the Flag where the only losers are the users who are forced to persist through this cat-and-mouse game.
It’s important to note that Facebook (now Meta) purchased Instagram in 2012, but for the sake of exploring how features from one platform have dispersed into another, Instagram and Facebook will be treated as separate entities.
