Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube are getting ready behind the scenes to welcome TikTok users, should the Chinese-owned app be banned from the United States.
On Wednesday afternoon, executives at Meta held a Q&A session with some of its employees about the state of American politics.
Alex Schultz, the chief marketing officer, addressed questions about Meta’s embrace of the incoming Trump administration and what he said was the company’s precarious standing overseas, according to two attendees. He also said that Meta was paying close attention to the fate of one of its greatest competitors: TikTok.
Depending on what happened to TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and faces a ban in the United States, Meta needed to prepare for what could be a seismic shift in how Americans used social media, Mr. Schultz said. Meta had the potential to benefit, but he said the company needed to be ready.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, has a particular interest in the outcome. The Silicon Valley giant — along with Google’s YouTube and other social media apps — may stand to benefit if a law banning TikTok from the United States takes effect on Sunday, leaving TikTok’s 170 million monthly U.S. users high and dry. The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on whether the federal law in question is constitutional.
In private, Meta has dispatched teams to prepare for scooping up as many so-called TikTok refugees as possible, three people familiar with the plans said. That includes doing more to court TikTok’s popular influencers and possibly further tweaking Instagram to make certain features more familiar to heavy users of TikTok, they said. Instagram offers Reels, a short-form video product that competes with TikTok.
“Instagram is a natural home” for TikTok creators and users, said Richard Kramer, a financial analyst at Arete Research. “Like TikTok, the app has online shopping and robust user engagement.”