Hello, and welcome back to our Social Media News Of The Week section. The stories we’ll be looking into this week are:
TikTok Is On The Road To Ge Banned In The US After An Espionage Scandal
Instagram Outlines Its Key Focus Areas For 2023
and
Facebook Implements A New Way Of Creating Reels
TikTok Is on The Road To Ge Banned In The US After An Espionage Scandal
TikTok is facing a US ban after an investigation found out that a parent company ByteDance had been spying on several US journalists gaining access to sensitive information in the process.
Here’s our source page, The Financial Times, quoted on the matter:
“Over the summer, four employees on the ByteDance internal audit team looked into the sharing of internal information to journalists. Two members of staff in the US and two in China gained access to the IP addresses and other personal data of FT journalist Cristina Criddle, to work out if she was in the proximity of any ByteDance employees, the company said.”
A BuzzFeed journalist and several users connected to the aforementioned reporters were also targeted by the ByteDance probe. That, of course, is a significant violation of user privacy and a run against press freedom, even though TikTok had issued plenty of statements in trying to prove that US user info was completely safe in the hands of its Chinese employees.
As for now, TikTok remains under investigation by the Committee for Foreign Investment even though the app’s COO Vanessa Pappas testified before the Senate Homeland Security back in September in hopes to prove the effectiveness of TikTok’s data security measures:
“Our goal is to ensure non-US-based employees, including China-based employees, will only have access to a narrow set of TikTok US user data, such as public videos and comments available to anyone on the TikTok platform, to ensure global interoperability.”
And although such statements from TikTok are plenty, the allegations that the app is used as a bona fide spy platform are strong. The process is still ongoing, so we’ll have to wait around and see whether it is the end of TikTok in the US or just another issue solved by millions of cash.
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Instagram Outlines Its Key Focus Areas For 2023
What a tumultuous year it has been for Instagram! From star-led petitions to revert the app as it once was to constant copying of TikTok, there wasn’t a calm week for the platform.
The main thing, perhaps, that Instagram is missing these days is its status as a trendsetter and being an overall unique platform the way it used to be. However, last week Instagram chief Adam Mosseri released a video providing insight on what we should be expecting of Instagram in 2023, and although now it’s just words rather than action, we have to admit that it does sound nice.
So, let’s take a look at the three key Instagram focus areas for 2023.
- Inspire people to be creative
This was once the fundamental part of the platform – being creative. And although we’ve seen this creativity sometimes taking various weird paths – like creating unachievable beauty standards – it’s still there in its rudimentary form.
And 2023, as stated by Mosseri, should see a revival of this fundamental part. That’s why we should expect to see the app adding even more visual customization and editing tools emphasized by AR creation and integration of 3D objects and experiences in content.
The underlying cause of this call for creativity is probably Meta’s need to keep creators nearby to create and fulfilling their metaverse vision. And Instagram, naturally, provides the best way for Meta to interact with content creators and keep them near and in check.
However, that doesn’t mean that IG’s upcoming content creation implementations are not going to be fun and original; we’ll have to wait and see.
- Help people discover things they love
Okay, here’s the thing – Instagram, right from the start, was all about the content of the people you are following, whereas TikTok has established itself by showing its users the best overall content on the platform which they would like. Consequently, Instagram’s shift to helping people discover what they like was met with a frown and still isn’t well-liked by its users to this day.
However, like it or not, this is the path the platform has chosen to continue on. And if now a user’s feed was comprised of around 15% of AI-suggested content, it is said to be double that by the end of 2023. Hopefully, though, the algorithm will be fine-tuned by then and won’t show you any of the unrelatable stuff you see now.
- Spark connections between people
IG has seen a definite shift in social engagement, mainly because people are now wary of what they post in their main feed (hello, cancel culture), and the interactions slid to DMs and small groups of people.
Instagram was looking for a way to feed into this by providing new additions like ‘Notes’, which enables users to share a conversation prompt in a stories-like bubble above their Direct inbox.
The idea behind this is to help trigger new conversations and engagement opportunities which, in turn, might build engagement around content rather than being just about the content itself.
Now, all of these focus areas do not stray from anything that Instagram has been doing over the past year – the push for creativity, the additional emphasis on discovery, and getting people together were all there before, but this year we might see a refinement on these implementations. And, if done right, we might also see a revival of the platform, too (or a revival because TikTok will get banned in the US).
Facebook Implements A New Way Of Creating Reels
Now, we all know that Meta is striving to recreate TikTok’s success by pushing its users to create loads more short-format videos. However, as of a recent addition to the creative tools package, you don’t even have to make a video to… make a video.
As you’ll see in the image below, Meta’s adding yet another way to get users to share Reels on Facebook – even if they don’t have any video uploads of their own.
This implementation does not do much else besides punching people to post more of the revered short-format video content. It’s not for creativity, and it’s not for entertainment, really (photos mashed up in a video is not something new), but purely for diluting the existing content with more TikTok-like forms of content.
What Meta is doing here is not trying to make an exact copy of TikTok, but rather diminish the app’s unique value and retain their existing users from leaving Meta’s apps. After all, it is easier to use the apps you are used to rather than downloading new ones and building your feed from scratch. So, if Meta cannot conquer their competitors with uniqueness, it can at least diminish the competitor’s value. And seemingly, that’s what they are doing.
