Meta-owned Instagram is imitating yet another feature from TikTok, which is the ability for users to play a reel at 2x speed by long pressing on the right or left side of their screen.

When TikTok first launched, videos could only be 15 seconds long but as the years passed and TikTok rose in popularity, the social network pushed out support for lengthier videos.

With this, TikTok introduced the option for users to speed up videos, as they had been trained to consume content more quickly.

Instagram Reels also began off by allowing users to upload videos that were only up to 15 seconds in duration but currently, users have the ability to share videos that are up to three minutes in length.

Like TikTok, Instagram wants to give users the option to view more content rapidly with the new fast-forward option.

The capacity to fast-forward a video increases the likelihood that a viewer will actually reach the conclusion of longer videos, particularly because the concept behind Reels is to provide users with brief, bite-sized entertainment.

This may be due to apprehensions that the proliferation of short-form video content is having a detrimental effect on our attention spans and capacity to concentrate on longer-form content.

Given that Instagram Reels is a direct clone of TikTok, it’s not surprising that the platform is borrowing specific features from the short-form video platform.

It’s not the first time Instagram has done so either, as its Remix feature is a replication of TikTok’s Duet utility.