Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner have joined in the calls urging Instagram to stop mimicking TikTok’s focus on video-oriented content and asking the Meta-owned platform to return to prioritizing photos.
Both sisters posted the same message for their 687 million cumulative followers on their IG Stories: “Make Instagram Instagram Again.”
The post continues, “Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends. Sincerely, Everyone.”
The message serves as the lead image on a Change.org petition that Jenner and Kardashian reposted to their Stories. It launched on July 22 and had fewer than 100,000 signatures before the sisters’ reshare. As of this publication, the petition has shot up to more than 150,500 signees.
Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, which owns IG, has been aggressively pushing the app to focus on more short-video content in order to compete with TikTok, and many users have not responded well to the change. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri released a video on Tuesday to respond to the growing backlash.
“I’m hearing a lot of concerns about right now about photos and how we’re shifting to video,” he said. “Now, I want to be clear, we’re gonna continue to support photos. It’s part of our heritage. … That said, I need to be honest: I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we do nothing. … So we’re gonna have to lean into that shift.”
Mosseri went on to say the app will continue to support photos but that its pivot to video-focused content is the result of what people are liking, sharing, and consuming. He also added that IG’s new full-screen version of the feed is just a test and admitted it’s “not yet good.”
Plenty of users aren’t satisfied with Mosseri’s response. ″Stop making everything reels,” one person wrote on Twitter. “You’re making everyone from journalists, content creators, CEOs, and celebrities agree. It’s now an app for everything you’re advertising, not of my friends and people I think are cool.”“When is Instagram going to accept that not all creators are video creators? Graphic designers, photographers, and other visual artists helped build IG and rely on it to share their work,” another user tweeted. “And now you’re screwing them over to become a 15 sec video streaming site ppl can’t control.”
