Instagram steals from TikTok
Picture this: It’s March 2020 and the covid-19 pandemic is raging outside your door. With nothing else to do, what do you turn to? TikTok of course. TikTok, which was born out of lip-syncing app Musical.ly, saw a massive surge in users when stay-at-home orders forced us to…well…stay at home during the peak of the covid-19 pandemic.
In a feverish bid to breathe life into what was once Goliath to Vine and Snapchat’s David, Instagram developed and released their own “TikTok” feature within the app itself, dubbed Reels. Instagram Reels debuted in August 2020, and TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer said in a blog, as quoted by Variety: “At TikTok we welcome competition… To those who wish to launch competitive products, we say bring it on.”
