Instagram versus the big band of celebrities?
The photo-sharing app, owned by Meta, has come under fire this week for how it has changed over time. The build-up began on Monday, when Kylie Jenner, the beauty mogul with 361 million Instagram followers, shared an image on the site that read: “Make Instagram Instagram again. (Stop trying to be tiktok, just I want to see beautiful photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.”
With a “PLEASEEEEEEE” on her Instagram story, Ms. Jenner, who has the third most followers on the platform, fanned the flames of celebrity criticism.
“PRETTY PLEASE,” Kim Kardashian, Ms Jenner’s half-sister and the seventh most followed Instagram user, echoed in a later story.
On Tuesday, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, sought to quell user anger over how the app has rolled out features that make it more similar to TikTok, the wildly popular Chinese-owned video app. Instagram has become concerned that TikTok is stealing the attention of its users.
To avoid a decline, Instagram recently began testing where videos were prioritized in user feeds and photos and videos took up the entire screen, from top to bottom, instead of a portion. Last week, it announced that all videos will be published as Reels, which were presented as short video montages, and launched features that encourage collaboration with other users.
In a post on Tuesday, Mr. Mosseri said Instagram was shifting to video and that people liked and shared more videos than photos, regardless of changes to the platform. “I have to be honest,” he said. “I think more and more Instagram will become video over time.”
Mr. Mosseri said Instagram was in the early stages of change. “I also want to be clear. It’s still not good,” he said of the update.
Social media-savvy celebrities like Ms. Jenner and Ms. Kardashian have been irritated by changes on other platforms before, and they’ve had an effect. In February 2018, after Snapchat updated its interface to require users to switch between screens to access different features, Ms Jenner tweeted: “Anyone else not opening Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me…ugh this is so sad “.
Within a week, Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, had lost $1.3 billion in market value.
After Ms. Jenner and Ms. Kardashian made their displeasure known on Instagram on Monday, other celebrities weighed in.
“We don’t want to do videos Adam lol,” Chrissy Teigen, a model and author with 39 million Instagram followers, tweeted in response to Mr. Mosseri
James Charles, a beauty YouTuber who has 23 million Instagram followers, also commented in an Instagram comment. “The reason there’s so much growth for video is because we’re FORCED to post video… The shift to video isn’t industry-wide, it’s TikTok-wide,” he said.
An Instagram spokeswoman said: “We don’t have much more to share about the changes beyond what Adam said.”