Facebook Introduces Instagram Reels, To Rival TikTok

By Shivaune Field

Move aside Stories, there is a new short video-clip series in Instagram town. Reels was announced this week by Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, as a new way to share 15-second content clips with your friends. The launch included the release of ‘reels’ from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, and well-known social media influencers. Reels allows users to select songs from the Instagram music library, apply AR effects to the video, use a timer and countdown, create seamless transitions, and adjust the speed of the clip.

If it sounds a lot like TikTok, that’s because it is. Reel’s distinct advantage over Chinese-owned TikTok is that it is a part of a U.S. based tech company. TikTok is facing intense scrutiny by U.S. authorities over the possibility that it may send data on U.S. users to the Chinese government. The company has been given until September 15 to make a deal with Microsoft, which has expressed interested in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. If a deal can not be made to sell TikTok to a U.S. tech company, President Trump has issued an executive order for it to be shut down on September 15.

The executive order was one of two issued on Thursday evening targeting Chinese tech companies. The order states that there is deep concern about TikTok automatically capturing information from users, “including internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.” President Trump’s order outlines the concerns he has about a Chinese-owned company operating in the U.S. accessing information on American citizens. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

Tiktok is owned by Beijing based company Bytedance and runs its U.S. operation from an office in Santa Monica. The company says that all Tiktok data is stored on servers in the U.S. and that backup data is located in Singapore. ByteDance is adamant that no data from TikTok is sent to China, and that the platform is not subject to censorship by the Chinese Communist Party.

Congress is not convinced either. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed that TikTok has been the subject of an ongoing investigation, and the Senate unanimously passed a bill on Thursday banning the app from all government devices. A part of the concern is China’s national security law that was passed in 2017. The bill states that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and maintain the secrecy of all knowledge of state intelligence work.” While ByteDance says the government has not asked for TikTok data, U.S. authorities are concerned that it may in the future, and that Chinese company leaders will be obligated to provide it.

According to Buzzfeed, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg spoke about President Trump’s desire to ban the app in the U.S. in a company-wide meeting. “I certainly think that there are valid national security questions about having an app that has a lot of people’s data that follows the rules of another country, a government that is increasingly is kind of seen as a competitor,” Zuckerberg said. “I just think it’s a really bad long-term precedent, and that it needs to be handled with the utmost care and gravity whatever the solution is. I am really worried…it could very well have long-term consequences in other countries around the world.”

Whether TikTok is shut down or not, Instagram users in 50 countries now have its new Reels product to play with. And being that Instagram has more than a billion users worldwide, that could be a lot of Reels coming our way very soon.