For months, Instagram watched and waited to see what would happen to rival TikTok under a new federal law that would ban the app in the United States. On Sunday, the day the law came into effect, Instagram surged.
The social media app, which is owned by Meta, announced a new app called Edits, a video editing product that appears to be a clone of CapCut, used by millions to put together short videos for TikTok. CapCut and TikTok are owned by ByteDance, the Chinese internet giant, leading the United States to examine these apps for national security reasons.
“There’s a lot going on in the world right now,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in a post on the platform on Sunday. “No matter what happens, we feel it’s our job to create the most compelling creative tools for those of you who create videos.”
TikTok and its sister apps, CapCut and Lemon8, have long given American social media apps a run for their money. TikTok has 170 million users in the United States and has said in legal documents that it cannot afford to fade into obscurity, even temporarily, because it would suffer a competitive disadvantage over one of its largest markets.
On Saturday evening, hours before the federal law banning TikTok took effect, TikTok, CapCut and Lemon8 became unavailable, although TikTok came back to life on Sunday when President-elect Donald J. Trump said he planned to release a decree this week. to block the ban.
TikTok’s competitors did not wait to take advantage of the situation. Mr. Mosseri described the changes as being designed specifically to allow creators to edit videos on their phones and save ideas for other videos they might want to publish later.
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