BackSorry, Kylie Jenner, Instagram won’t stop trying to be TikTok
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, responded to Jenner's public call to 'stop trying to be TikTok'.
PremiumDespite a flood of criticism, especially from Kylie Jenner, the most-followed woman on Instagram, the social media platform has pledged to continue pushing for video, full-screen posts and algorithm-driven recommended posts from strangers.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, responded to Jenner's public call to "stop trying to be TikTok" and reverse the alterations with a video message that did not specifically mention the beauty entrepreneur.
According to Mosseri, users could switch to a feed of posts from people they are following or halt the feature for up to a month if they did not like the recommended content. “So we’re going to have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos," he said.
Earlier, Kylie Jenner reposted a post in which she criticised the app's redesign and exhorted it to "stop trying to be TikTok". 'PLEASEEEEEEE', Jenner pleaded. Soon after, her famous sister and fellow cast member Kim Kardashian chipped in by posting the same picture and the words "PRETTY PLEASE."
Kylie Jenner's posts are widely followed due to her influence on social media. Sister Kim Kardashian has 326 million Instagram followers whereas Kylie has 360 million. In 2018, Jenner's criticism of Snapchat's parent company, Snap Inc., resulted in a one-day market value loss of $1.3 billion.
Meta's future may lie in the metaverse, but when the company reports results on Wednesday, investors will be focused on two more immediate bets: pumping up short-video offering Reels to compete with TikTok and rebuilding its ads system after Apple throttled access to user data.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg believes that will take time, and that the company needs to speed up the process, he told staffers on a call late last month. The discussion hit on key issues that will be watched in Meta's quarterly results release on Wednesday.
Meta is expected to record its first-ever revenue drop in its history as a public company, down 0.4% to about $29 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Investors are also bracing for flat user growth and a third consecutive quarter of profit declines and are watching for signs of hardware project cuts and slower hiring to manage costs.
The social media giant this year has unveiled sweeping redesigns of Facebook and Instagram, imitating rival TikTok's look and algorithmically driven recommendations of viral short videos.
Meta is also investing heavily to rebuild its ads system around its own user data, after privacy changes introduced last year by Apple degraded Meta's ad targeting capabilities.
Zuckerberg told employees on the call, which took place on June 30, that Reels represented a "huge opportunity" for Meta, but also noted that the format was "still only around 15% of the size of TikTok."
(With agency inputs)
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