Instagram is bringing several creator-focused updates to its platform. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said the new feature was meant to “ensure that credit goes to those who deserve it.”
There are 3 updates that Mosseri announced in a short video, as usual. First, product tags are now available to everyone, so personal accounts that are not business or organizational accounts can now tag products.
Second, users can assign categories to their own accounts, such as “Photographer” or “Rapper”, so that when other users tag you, that category will appear in the post. Lastly, Instagram will start promoting more original content from the platform.
“If you make something from scratch,” Mosseri says in his video, “you should get more credit than if you re-share something you find from someone else. We will try and do more to try and value original content more, especially compared to reposted content.”
In other words, this update is intended to stop users from re-sharing videos from TikTok to Reels pages. Meta makes it clear that Facebook and Instagram are content-focused platforms. Both platforms have invested in a lot of things, such as shopping tools, ways for content creators to build audiences, and other things that they hope will entice creators to stop being TikTokers and YouTubers and start becoming Instagrammers and Facebookers.
Reels, in particular, are at the heart of this endeavor. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the short video format “our fastest growing content format so far,” and it's now available on Facebook and Instagram.
But instead of creating new content, users tend to repost content from TikTok, complete with its logo. And this is the problem Mosseri seems to be fighting.
The push for original content on Meta social products is nothing new. The Meta platform has the largest audience, but TikTok, Twitter, and others tend to be where new memes and trends are created. Quoted from The Verge (21/4), one possible way is to increase creator monetization. However, given that Meta appears to be cutting Reels payouts, it's unlikely this will happen anytime soon.
