Twitter/X becomes latest TikTok mimic with dedicated video tab

Instagram and Snapchat have also made plays to siphon off some of TikTok's 170 million users.

By Emma Keates | January 21, 2025 | 1:25pm

Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

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Twitter/X becomes latest TikTok mimic with dedicated video tab

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TikTok is very much alive, but that hasn’t stopped pretty much every other platform from attempting to tear it apart like vultures at the trash heap. Instagram changed their profile interface to more closely mimic the video sharing app, unexpected players like Snapchat and Substack have been touting their services as a new home for your favorite creators, and now—unsurprisingly—Twitter/X wants in on the action. Elon Musk is the sole leader of the department of government efficiency now, and nothing says “efficient” more than the market hosting seven different versions of the same thing!

This week, X began rolling out a dedicated video tab for U.S. users with a TikTok-esque endless scroll. “The Video Tab has arrived. LFG,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in a post Sunday night. If you’re still getting your dopamine from X despite, well, everything, you can find the tab next to the Grok AI button on the bottom of your screen.

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Despite this breathless race to claim TikTok’s 170 million users, a huge chunk of that gold-plated group have proven they have no intention of ever migrating back to Twitter, Meta, or any other U.S.-owned megacorp. In advance of the impending TikTok ban (which turned out to be more 12-hour nap than total blackout), thousands of users fled to RedNote (Xiaohongshu), a Mandarin-langauge platform.

We’ll see if they stick around as part of the app’s newfound international community, because, as we said before, TikTok is very much alive. After the little blip, videos of people raising their ya ya ya were restored for all U.S. users on Sunday, alongside an on-the-nose popup: “Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” Yesterday, Trump further supported the app by signing an executive order delaying enforcement of the federal ban for 75 days. But hey—silver lining; maybe that decision created some tension between him and his new best bud Elon. We’ll take what we can get these days.