Fresh on the heels of his $44 billion Twitter purchase, Elon Musk is fueling speculation he will revive a TikTok competitor.
Vine was a short-form video hosting service that allowed sharing of six-second long video loops before it was acquired by Twitter in 2012. The service reportedly had 200 million monthly active users in December 2015 but was ended by Twitter the following year.
Musk wondered aloud if he should bring Vine back.
The Conservative Brief further reported:
“Late Sunday, the multi-billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder posted a tweet that indicated he may be ready to take on the short-form video platform TikTok, which has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years.”
His first indicator was a poll he posted to his Twitter account that asked: “Bring back Vine?”
“Vine was an American short-form video hosting service where users could share six-second-long looping video clips. It was founded in June 2012; American microblogging website Twitter acquired it in October 2012 before its official release on January 24, 2013,” says a description of the app.
The Western Journal adds:
Vine was TikTok’s predecessor in many ways.
It was a platform filled with often-humorous, short-form video clips of people and animals doing weird and crazy stuff. The platform was all the rage for several years until it was ultimately shut down because of a lack of monetization opportunities and too much competition, The Verge reported at the time.
Shortly after he posted the survey, Musk returned to Twitter and asked users: “What could we do to make it better than TikTok?”
Conservative commentator and podcaster Benny Johnson was immediately on board with the idea of reviving Vine.
“Yes – please. Creators hate tik tok. Nonsensical banning and deplatforming and deboosting. Tik tok algorithm feeds users uninteresting drivel. Their TOS is spyware. The platform will be banned in America soon if theyre not careful and users will need an alternative,” he wrote in response to Musk’s survey.
Later, he added: “Make it a free speech platform not run by communists. Kinda like you did with Twitter.”
Apparently, the idea to revive Vine isn’t just a whimsical notion. According to Business Insider, Musk has instructed Twitter engineers to begin the process:
The short-form video app Vine could be revived soon, six years after being shut down, if Elon Musk has his way.
Musk, who completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last week, has directed Twitter engineers to work on a Vine relaunch, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to Insider on Monday.
Axios, which first reported the news, said Musk gave an end-of-year deadline and that one engineer told the publication that Vine’s old code base “needs a lot of work.”
“The Big Picture,” Axios added, is this: “The Vine reboot is one of several sweeping changes Musk is considering just days after buying Twitter for $44 billion, including new options for user verification.”
Rob Smith, a frequent Fox News contributor, noted that reviving Vine would give video creators a platform without the “CCP spyware,” a reference to China’s ongoing interest in using TikTok to collect mountains of data on American users.
“The fact that it wouldn’t be owned by a bad faith foreign actor intent on disrupting our society while stealing all our data would be a start,” he wrote in response to Musk.
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