Instagram stands to gain a lot if TikTok is banned.
A chart featured in Meta's opening statement during its FTC antitrust trial showed just how much Instagram could benefit.
The Meta-owned platform reported a spike in usage when TikTok went dark for roughly 14 hours in January.
"People went to Instagram," Meta's lawyer, Matt Hansen, said this week while pointing to the chart. "Boom almost instantly."
Specifically, Instagram saw a spike in hourly time spent when TikTok was unavailable in the US. After TikTok returned, the hourly time spent on Instagram appeared to return to normal, per the chart.
TikTok's future is still in limbo after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 4 granting TikTok an additional 75 days to land on a solution that would meet the requirements of the divest-or-ban law. TikTok's China-based owner, ByteDance, still needs to find a new owner for its US app.
If TikTok is banned, however, Instagram could very well see another flood of users to its platform. More users spending time on Meta-owned apps like Instagram and Facebook — which both have short-form video feeds — could result in more advertising revenue for the tech giant.
EMARKETER, a sister company of Business Insider, estimated in January that Meta could gain between $2.46 billion and $3.38 billion in ad revenue if TikTok were banned.
Instagram is also gearing up to launch a new editing app for its short-form video feature reels, called Edits, in the coming weeks. It would compete with ByteDance's video editing app CapCut.
