Facebook announced the launch of the new "Rails" feature for short and entertaining videos on its Instagram platform, a service very similar to the "Talk Talk" app that attracted a wide audience of young people and threatened US President Donald Trump to ban it.
As Tik Tok, Rails allows to publish and share video recordings for display to users whose domain is not limited to the circle of friends and followers, "which gives everyone the opportunity to become a content maker on" Instagram "and to communicate their posts to new audiences on the world stage," according to what Facebook announced in a statement.
And after trying this feature since November in Brazil, and then in France and Germany since June, this new format will start in Wednesday in 50 countries from the United States to Australia, via Britain, India and Japan.
Instagram users will find a new tab that allows them to add AR visual effects and music while switching between 15-second short videos recorded on a smartphone.
The new feature shares the same principle with "Tik Tok", which was launched two years ago and achieved great international success, especially thanks to its light and comical publications.
"We were not the first to create the events tape, and we weren't the first to create storylines, and of course we are not the first to create short-term videos," Vishal Shah, product manager, said in June.
Social networks compete to gain the attention of users and increase their time. Its economic model is based on personal data that builds consumer profiles and sells targeted advertisements on a large scale.
The application "Tik Tok" has achieved a large mass in recent months, especially in the stage of domestic quarantine to combat the Covid-19 epidemic, and crossed the threshold of a billion users, comparing it with "Instagram".
However, the application of a Chinese group has become the center of trade and political tensions between the United States and China, in light of unconfirmed accusations by Washington of spying on users for the account of Beijing.
US President Donald Trump has waved a ban on Tik Tok in the United States if the sale of it to a US company is not completed by September 15.