After heavy criticism, Instagram has rolled back TikTok-like features

New Del­hi: Meta-owned pho­to-shar­ing plat­form Insta­gram will pause fea­tures that emu­late Tik­Tok’s fea­tures. After strong crit­i­cism from users, the com­pa­ny’s boss has decid­ed to roll back the new fea­tures, includ­ing a full-screen home feed and more fea­tured posts. Many users and inter­na­tion­al celebri­ties resist­ed the recent changes. Users ini­ti­at­ed the cam­paign against Insta­gram for lost orig­i­nal­i­ty. They called on the social net­work­ing plat­form to become sim­i­lar to Tik­Tok. Celebri­ty sis­ters Kim Kar­dashi­an and Kylie Jen­ner also joined the cam­paign, post­ing slo­gans on social media. 

The slo­gan “make Insta­gram Insta­gram again” and stop try­ing to be like Tik­Tok comes from a change.org peti­tion that has received more than 2,29,000 sig­na­tures as of Thurs­day. “Let’s go back to our roots with Insta­gram and remem­ber that the inten­tion behind Insta­gram was to share pho­tos, for Pete’s sake,” the peti­tion reads. (Also read: Apple India Rev­enue Near­ly Dou­bles in June Quar­ter 2022) 

Insta­gram boss Adam Mosseri post­ed a video to Twit­ter ear­li­er this week, assur­ing the pub­lic that the recent­ly updat­ed fea­tures are in the test­ing phase and will be test­ed with a small num­ber of users. “I’m glad we took a risk — if we don’t fail every once in a while, we’re not think­ing big enough or bold enough. But we def­i­nite­ly need to take a big step back and regroup. When we have learned a lot, we come back with some kind of new idea or iter­a­tion. So we’re going to work through that,” Mosseri said in an inter­view with plat­former Casey New­ton. (Also read: ITR fil­ing FY 2021–22: #Extend­Due­Date imme­di­ate­ly trends on Twitter) 

“If you look at what peo­ple are shar­ing on Insta­gram, that’s shift­ing more and more to video over time, we have to embrace that shift,” he added. After heavy crit­i­cism, social net­work­ing plat­forms revealed con­cerns and plans to step back and fig­ure out how to proceed.