Facebook’s Instagram introduces another new feature ripped off from a rival app

Facebook has billions of users across a variety of platforms – and it’s using that as an excuse to keep stealing ideas from competitors.

Facebook-owned image sharing social media platform Instagram has announced an exciting new feature that has been more or less ripped off from its surging Chinese rival TikTok.

The new Instagram Reels feature – which will first roll out in Brazil before an expected global rollout – is part of the platform’s Stories mode.

In Reels, you can create 15-second videos set to music, or you can take the audio from someone else’s video to create your own version or twist it in a new direction.

Fans of irony may note the similarities. This philosophy of “borrowing” from another user’s video to create one of your own is central to the TikTok platform Facebook has taken the idea from and helps turn jokes into memes that go viral as more and more users put their own spin on the content.

This copy-paste sharing and the impact of its virality has previously demonstrated the potential power of TikTok in the future.

TikTok’s popularity has been surging, particularly in young users who view Facebook as old hat. Picture: Joel Saget / AFP

US musician Lil Nas X spent a record-breaking 19 weeks at the top of the charts after his hit song Old Town Road went viral through TikTok users (admittedly 18 of those weeks were for a remix of the song featuring Billy Ray Cyrus).

It’s not even the first time Facebook has copied TikTok – last year it launched Lasso, a stand-alone app designed to do so.

Lasso is still limited to the US, where it hasn’t really caught on.

Now Instagram will give users the option to create similar content without even leaving the app.

RELATED: Facebook’s big image overhaul

Adding Reels to Instagram makes it more likely it can build a user base since you won’t have to download a new app or make a new account and can start posting clips to the Instagram story you already have.

As part of the Stories mode, it’s likely Reels will continue in the same vein with regards to tone, further solidifying the separation between what are practically two different versions of Instagram within Instagram.

The “permanent feed” that’s existed on Instagram since the start will continue offering the curated and aspirational “highlight reel” to show off your most important content that best showcases your personal brand, while the Stories section (a feature copied from rival Snapchat in 2016) will continue using its expiring vignettes to share more mundane or silly parts of your everyday life.

Facebook recently announced another feature called Threads, which was also a clone of a Snapchat feature.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has copied TikTok. Picture: Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse/Getty

Instagram director of product management Robby Stein told TechCrunch that TikTok “deserve a ton of credit” for popularising the format it will now use for Reels, mirroring previous comments from one of Instagram’s founders regarding Snapchat.

But Mr Stein’s explanation of why he thinks Reels will be successful illustrates the key problem with its introduction.

“Your friends are already all on Instagram. I think that’s only true of Instagram,” Mr Stein said.

Facebook’s power becoming entrenched through its main product (being us) makes sense even if it is a strange thing to hear a senior figure in the company admit. Its massive user base and the way it has built it recently drew the ire of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has recommended updating Australia’s laws so Facebook and other large digital platforms are forced to give advanced notice about their intent to take over other businesses so it can be assessed whether those businesses already compete with Facebook or conceivably could compete with it in the future.

Instagram was cited as an example of a site that could have grown into a competitor to Facebook but didn’t get the chance to do so before being acquired by the social media giant.

These laws, if implemented, are unlikely to do anything to stop Facebook shamelessly copying its rivals however.

The social media site was previously the target of an eventually settled lawsuit from a group who accused the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for the social network after they engaged him to work on their own social media site.

Like all massive tech and social companies, TikTok is not without its own set of problems.

The Chinese-owned app recently came under fire for appearing to censor posts relating to the protests in Hong Kong and is under investigation in the US over “national security” concerns in relation to its data collection.

Will Instagram’s new TikTok clone catch on or will people stick with the original app? Let us know what you think in the comments below.