TikTok along with 59 other Chinese apps was banned in India on June 29th, 2020. However, the craze for TikTok, the social media app, which allows you to create and share short videos (something like Karaoke of digital age), is never ending. Many users in India have tried accessing the platform using a VPN (Virtual Private Network), and uploading their video to other social media platforms like FB or IG.

Clearly, Instagram hasn’t appreciated that!

What’s wrong with uploading TikTok video?

As per the latest Insta policy, IG will now demote videos (known as reels on IG) that contain a TikTok watermark. This policy update is quite surprising considering the fact that Reels on Instagram is inspired by TikTok!

The only sigh of relief is that Instagram won’t be shadow-banning your account, it will only be limiting the reach of your video if it contains a watermark of TikTok app. This reduce reach will be somewhat similar to promoting low quality videos on the platform.

Your video will be visible to users on your page, even visible to the hashtags that you have targeted, but, it won’t show up on the general ‘Reels’ section.

This change might upset some users but, this was expected from Instagram in the long run. The reason can be attributed to the success of Reels, since its launch and with the success it’s quite inevitable that IG would not like to give preference or promote it’s competitor.

Instagram spokesperson Devi Narasimhan said, “We’re building on what we’ve learned from Explore to recommend fun and entertaining videos in places like the Reels tab, and personalise the experience. We are getting better at using ranking signals that help us predict whether people will find a reel entertaining and whether we should recommend it.”

What are your thoughts on this? Please share in comments.

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