Even Twitter is becoming TikTok

Swipe up for more videos — where have I heard that before? | Image: Twitter

Twitter is joining the bandwagon of social media companies copying TikTok’s everlasting scroll of videos. In a blog post on Thursday, the company announced that it’s updating its video player to be “immersive” — tapping on it will make the video full screen, and if you scroll up, you’ll “start browsing more engaging video content.” The company is also adding a video carousel to its Explore tab, which will show you “some of the most popular videos being shared on Twitter.”

The company says its “immersive media viewer” will start to roll out in the iOS Twitter app over the next few days and that the videos on the Explore tab are “currently available to people in select countries” who are using iOS or Android. Both updates are coming to people using the app in English first.

Image: Twitter
The Explore tab will now have a section dedicated to videos.

While Twitter doesn’t seem to be going all in on copying TikTok like Instagram has, it’s definitely a big change; until this point, videos have mostly been treated as parts of tweets. (Though the somewhat annoying floating livestream player acted as its own thing in certain situations.) Now, they’re becoming their own separate experience; it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we end up getting a dedicated video tab soon, where you’ll automatically be given a starting video to begin your scrolling. The company’s post does say that it wants to make Twitter “the best place for video,” after all.

While TikTok is still a huge deal, social media companies haven’t always found success copying it. For every YouTube Shorts, there’s a yanked Instagram redesign that turned even photo posts into a full-screen scrolling experience, sparking backlash from some of the biggest users on the platform.