Twitter has announced that it has caught the same affliction that Instagram is dealing with — it’s trying to be TikTok.
In a post to the Twitter blog, the social network announced that it is rolling out a new, scrollable full-screen video experience to users on iOS. “To help make it easier to find and watch what’s happening, we’re rolling out two new updates to how you experience videos on Twitter,” the blog post said after noting that videos are watched billions of times on its platform.
“Twitter’s updated immersive media viewer expands videos to full screen with a single click, allowing you to easily access the full, immersive viewing experience,” the announcement explained. Using it is as simple as tapping on a video in the official Twitter app.
To make video discovery easier, Twitter says that users can “scroll up to start browsing more engaging video content” once a video ends. The back arrow is always there to give people a way to get out of the video view and back to their timeline, too.
Twitter says that the new “immersive media viewer” is rolling out to people across its network in the coming days — although only in English, and only on iOS. Everyone else will have to wait a little while longer, it seems.
Twitter also announced a new video portion of the Explore tab, giving people a way to find videos that are specifically suited to them thanks to a new “Videos for you” category.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is — TikTok has long been the king of the hill for vertical and scrollable video, despite attempts by Instagram and Meta to catch up. Twitter might not be trying to go toe-to-toe with TikTok just now, but it’s easy to see where the inspiration is coming from.
