Facebook’s Instagram Launches TikTok Copycat in Political Storm
- Instagram Reels now available in more than 50 countries
- Release coincides with U.S. concerns over ByteDance’s TikTok
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Facebook Inc.’s Instagram photo-sharing app is launching its clone of TikTok in more than 50 countries, a week after Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg defended the company’s copycat strategies to U.S. lawmakers at an antitrust hearing.
The product, called Reels, lets people edit 15-second clips of videos together alongside music, just like on TikTok. It will be embedded into Instagram in the U.S. and elsewhere, the company said Wednesday in blog post. Reels is the second major Instagram feature that follows an almost identical one popularized by a competitor. Instagram Stories, the tool for posting videos and photos that disappear, was inspired by