How long has the bell been tolling for TikTok? Long enough for Instagram to come up with a competitor. In August, days after President Trump threatened to ban the Chinese-owned short-form-video app from operating in the United States, Instagram rolled out Reels, a tool for creating similarly succinct music- and text-enhanced video. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s already gonna know how to use it, I don’t know why,” Besidone Amoruwa, a strategic-partnerships manager at Instagram, said the other day.
She was addressing a Zoom room of more than two hundred burgeoning Black actors, musicians, and creative types who had been invited to a party to preview Reels and brush up on Instagram’s best practices. (“We wanted it to feel like some sort of production,” Amoruwa explained, later. “Where people aren’t bored, where they’re not just reading a PDF.”) At the start of the event, she begged the attendees to mute their microphones. “We don’t need to hear your cat meowing,” she said. She wore large hoop earrings and had her hair in a topknot.
Months of #challenges (#blackouttuesday, #blackandwhitechallenge, #life) had raised a question: What’s the best way to participate in performative, hashtag-based Instagram trends? “Don’t try so hard,” Sarissa Thrower, an Instagram communications manager, advised. She wore a purple jumpsuit and had a chin-length bob. “You don’t have to be everything to everyone.” Heads nodded. “Be authentic, and you will find your tribe.”
Amoruwa pressed Play on a video tutorial by Mark Phillips, a comedian with two million Instagram followers who operates under the handle @supremedreams_1. “You know how doctors gotta be best at their job at surgery or the person’s gonna die? That’s what you’ve gotta do with Instagram,” he said. “Treat it like your job.” Jump-cut to Phillips in a white coat, medical implements in hand, above a friend laid out like the patient in the board game Operation. His prescription: post as much as possible, all over Instagram.
“The world is something else right now,” Amoruwa said, during the “Safety & Well-being” portion of the event. “Make sure you block accounts that are being crazy,” she went on.“My favorite trick is restrict, a.k.a. ghosting. When you restrict someone from your profile, only you and the person you restrict will be able to see their new comments. It’s like they’re living in their own world and you have nothing to do with it.”
Lala Milan, an actress with 3.4 million followers (bio: “I’m more than IG. Check my IMDB”), led a crash course on Reels. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, reportedly offered top TikTok personalities six figures to bring their business and sponsorship deals to Reels, which has caught on among such brands as Louis Vuitton and Red Bull. “This is your chance to blow up,” Milan said, demonstrating how to synch a video up to a particular part of a song. Sounds of audio rewinding and fast-forwarding were heard, then a line from Megan Thee Stallion: “I’m sick of motherfuckers tryna tell me how to live.”
Milan said, “Okay, so I chose the right part.”
After the singer Mikayla Simpson (stage name: Koffee) performed three songs with similarly of-the-moment lyrics (“I put your body on lockdown”), John Boyega, an actor and a Black Lives Matter activist, appeared on the screen. Amoruwa asked what advice he’d give to the aspiring stars in the Zoom room. “You’ve got to collaborate, man,” he said, and then caught himself. “Sorry, I’m from the U.K. When we say ‘Big man ting,’ ” he continued, “we mean ‘on the real.’ ”
He explained that the people who are creating obstacles for Black artists in entertainment “collaborate with each other.” He recently spoke out about being marginalized by the “Star Wars” franchise, in which he plays Finn. In September, he stepped down as the global ambassador of the fragrance company Jo Malone London after it replaced him in a Chinese ad campaign without his consent.
“They take each other’s phone calls, they’re building new projects, ” he went on. “We need to really lean in to that.”
Although it seems oddly convenient for Reels to arrive as TikTok unravels (in the U.S., at least), Instagram has been working on the platform for more than a year. “We started testing a much earlier version in Brazil last November,” Tessa Lyons-Laing, Instagram’s director of product management for Reels, said after the party. “It’s more that the timing kind of coincided than that one influenced the other.” Reels is not all amateur music videos and improbable outfit changes. Amoruwa mentioned “Smarter in Seconds,” a Reels series in which the activist and author Blair Imani, who is Black, bisexual, and Muslim, offers advice on how to address a potentially sensitive subject. Recent episodes include “Pronouns Part 3: But What if Someone Doesn’t Know What Pronouns Are?” and “You Still Don’t Know What to Say Instead of ‘Minority?’ I Gotcha!” ♦
