The Not-So-Social Network

As Facebook and Instagram react to TikTok's rise, common assumptions about their grip on our attention are suddenly up for debate.

- HARRY MCCRACKEN

Most of the time, a 21-year-old photographer and influencer Tati Bruening uses Instagram to post photos of herself and behind-the-scenes looks at her shoots for her 320,000 followers. But in July, she took to Instagram to clap back at it. Like TikTok, it had started pushing full-screen videos from people she wasn't following into her feed, submerging the social aspect that had drawn her to the app in the first place. She channeled her ire into a cry that rocketed around the Instagram community when she posted it to her feed: 

MAKE INSTAGRAM INSTAGRAM AGAIN. (stop trying to be TikTok i just want to see cute photos of my friends) SINCERELY, EVERYONE

"Everyone," it turned out, included Instagram superusers Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, both of whom shared Bruening's plea with their followers-360 million and 326 million people, respectively. That turned the app’s seeming identity crisis into a global news story.

There was a time when it felt like In sta- gram might be content to let people see cute photos of their friends forever. Like its corporate sibling Facebook, it’s built on the power of “the social graph”—the connections that members establish with each other that make the network exponentially more valuable as more users join and share stuff with people they know. Meta, the apps’ parent company, has leveraged its control of these vast networks of connected people—almost 3 billion on Facebook, 2 billion-plus on Instagram—to build an online advertising business second only to Google’s.

But in TikTok, Meta faces a new, uncommonly threatening rival. In September 2021, TikTok’s owner, China’s ByteDance, announced that the app had reached 1 billion monthly global users. While ByteDance hasn’t revealed any official numbers since, it’s clear that TikTok is still surging.