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Can Instagram Reels Replace TikTok For Memes? Why A TikTok Ban May Not Be As Depressing As It Seems
The United States appears to be mere days away from a nationwide TikTok ban, and people are worried that Instagram Reels just doesn't have the same meme energy as the coveted Chinese algorithm.
"[What] am I supposed to do when TikTok gets banned?" said one worried Twitter user this week, attaching a screen recording of their unique "For You page pulls."
They obviously have a connection to the strange slop recommended to them. It's slop they worked hard for. It's sludge they can't get anywhere else. "They don’t have this on Reels," they continued, worried about the future of their "good screen" downtime.
This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 9-0 to uphold the TikTok ban … but is it over? Are the weird among us now subjected to an eternity of normie Reels too smooth-brained for our twisted enjoyment?
That's part of the panic online right now. It's the reason why millions of so-called "refugees" are flocking to RedNote because "everything happening in China is much more incredible" (so the meme goes).
But since the new year, memes from Instagram Reels have elevated to mainstream acclaim. At Know Your Meme, we've seen a significant uptick in original and organic meme creation from Meta's TikTok counterpart. It might not actually be over, but there are downsides as well to a post-TikTok world.
You have got to try reels it made me move from tiktok entirely
— hydra (@blephin_) January 12, 2025
Since 2022, TikTok has dwarfed all other platforms when it comes to original memes. This information comes from entries logged in the Know Your Meme database, which we notably studied in our "Where Do Memes Come From?" editorial that year. In the article, we discovered that TikTok accounted for a whopping 45.7 percent of all origins. Instagram, on the other hand, only logged 4.8 percent.
Instagram has also never led as a source of meme origins. It's never even come close. When compared to other giants of antiquity like Twitter (or X) and Reddit, which took up most of the pie chart in years like 2016 and 2018, Instagram falls short, seemingly because of its algorithm and various functionalities or features that don't aid memetic spread.
For example, Twitter invented the retweet and quote tweet to drive user engagement and maintain the original poster's credit. Instagram's only equivalent is a Story repost, but Instagram took inspiration for its "stories" from Snapchat anyway.
In reality, many of Instagram's major core updates and new features are attempts to stop the bleeding of its user base to other apps. The practice has given Instagram a notorious reputation as sort of a "culture vulture" in the social media landscape — continually incorporating other platforms' hot new features into its own.
Reels, one of its latest major mutations, was a reaction to TikTok's short-form video success, but it hasn't felt like TikTok until recently. "More than half of Instagram Reels are just reuploaded TikTok videos," said one user this week. However, that perception is starting to change.
Some of the biggest memes so far in 2025 have come from Instagram Reels. "Chopped Chin" was the first. It started when the Atlanta Dream WNBA team posted a Reel of former star Renee Montgomery and her son Angel dancing courtside at a game. The joke was at Angel's expense. Everyone was calling him "chopped" and joking about his "aura" being unmatched (ironically, of course).
It's not the kindest meme, but it resonated with a lot of people and did something that most memes don't do — it migrated from Reels to TikTok, not the other way around.
And all the worms weren't out of the can yet.
Other brainrot trends like "I Bought a Property in Egypt" and "Eye of Rah" festered in the underbelly of Instagram Reels, only to collide with each other into incompressible edits far removed from their original punchlines.
There always seems to be a New Year's bump when people want to create and add to the "first meme of the year," but this time, the frenzy started on Reels.
Instagram origins have continued ever since. There's a reason why a band of talented mice has been interrupting your TikTok feed, and that reason stems from an Instagram Reels creator.
A lot of these TikTok-like trends are happening on Instagram right now because Instagram's algorithm has seemingly begun to close in on its Chinese counterpart. People loved TikTok from the get-go because it showed them videos with sub-1,000 likes.
Scrolling TikTok can feel like both the front page of the internet and the deepest, darkest depths. Schizoids blabbing about their hallucinations and groundbreaking news from around the world seem to flatten the international experience into one app. That's part of the reason why some Americans are so scared to lose it.
In an act of mass retaliation this week, Americans downloaded Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, an app with Mandarin as its default language. It's both perceived as an "F you" to the establishment and likely a last grasp at maintaining TikTok's "world without borders" feel.
Numerous Americans, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are reaching their hands through China's "iron curtain" firewall and hoping there's someone on the other side to validate their belief that we're all a lot more alike than we're often told.
This dogma, created by social media, has undoubtedly been hardened and amplified by TikTok this decade.
Americans aren't necessarily losing that with a TikTok ban, but there will be new rules in place.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this week (sporting his new, marketable look) that Meta platforms are toning down fact-checking and "hate speech" censorship.
This might mean fewer meme pages getting shadowbanned, but it also foreshadows problematic and controversial discussions about things like trans rights, for instance, which is already happening on Elon Musk's X.
The cultural and political ramifications of that are another, longer discussion, but as far as memes go, the American internet might be okay in a post-TikTok world.
There's a consensus building that Instagram is now showing sub-1,000-like videos consistently, proving rarer than that one guy's FYP. If this holds, maybe we won't be missing TikTok at all.
