TikTok has gotten strange. Not just in the familiar way where the algorithm throws you into a spiral of oddly specific micro-trends, but in its very texture. Open the app today and it feels less like TikTok and more like a washed-out Instagram clone: cluttered, plasticky, bloated with filters you don’t want and menus you never asked for. The shift is subtle enough to pass unnoticed. But once you see it, it gnaws at you.
The Timeline That Stands Out
Many users trace the break to the “blackout” of February 2025, when TikTok went dark for nine hours. Some swear the app hasn’t felt the same since. For me, the real changes didn’t land until late summer. The camera interface suddenly mimicked Instagram’s infamous front-facing mess (grainy, unflattering, amateurish for a platform that once prided itself on slick usability). The filter menu followed. Where TikTok’s effects once felt curated, suddenly they were chaotic: duplicates stacked on duplicates, endless scrolls of recycled nonsense. It was as if TikTok had imported Instagram’s worst habits wholesale.
Meanwhile, Instagram was tearing out its own filter ecosystem. Meta shut down Spark AR (the system that once powered third-party effects) on January 14, 2025. From that day forward, all filters were built in-house. Which makes what happened next harder to dismiss: the same filter styles, with the same naming conventions, appearing on both TikTok and Instagram. On TikTok, they were still tied to creators. On Instagram, they collapsed into generic ID strings. It didn’t look like two companies competing. It looked like two companies quietly sharing homework.
That overlap looks less like coincidence once you factor in Oracle. Under “Project Texas,” Larry Ellison’s company serves as TikTok’s U.S. chaperone, with direct access to its source code and moderation systems. At the same time, Oracle is hosting Meta’s AI model, LLaMA, on its cloud infrastructure. Officially, they’re separate clouds. Unofficially, two rivals are leaning on the same landlord.
Ellison and Zuckerberg aren’t strangers either. They both dined at the White House with Xi Jinping in 2015, during a high-stakes summit on U.S.–China tech cooperation. For nearly a decade, they’ve been positioned as America’s emissaries to Beijing. Which makes the present convergence (design, policy, infrastructure) look less like a glitch and more like the continuation of an arrangement.
The Patent That Shouldn’t Exist
Then there’s the matter of patents. In August 2025, the U.S. Patent Office approved Meta’s claim on a filter carousel interface (patent D1089292), the very same design TikTok now uses. Normally, Meta would sprint to court to enforce it. Instead: silence. No lawsuits, no threats, nothing. The kind of silence that suggests coordination, not conflict.
Layer on whistleblower testimony and the picture sharpens. In early 2025, Meta insider Sarah Wynn-Williams alleged that the company had been collaborating with China since 2014, far deeper than it admitted publicly. Stack that claim against overlapping filters, guidelines, and patents, and the dots begin to connect.
Why This Isn’t Just Paranoia
If this were only a story about design choices, it wouldn’t matter. But it isn’t. It’s about the illusion of competition. For years, we’ve been told that platforms battle for our attention in a brutal free-market cage match. That competition, we were promised, would drive innovation.
But if the companies are converging by sharing language, infrastructure, and maybe even patents; then the illusion collapses. Users get the same product wrapped in different skins. Data flows across platforms more freely than disclosures admit. Surveillance expands, while innovation stalls.
The shifts on your screen, such as the filters that blur, the camera that flatters less, the cloned menus, are cosmetic traces of deeper consolidation if you ask me. And it’s the kind of consolidation that happens offstage, where Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and their allies in Washington and Beijing decide how platforms evolve. And once power concentrates at that level, choice stops being real. You’re not choosing between Instagram and TikTok.
You’re living inside the same machine.
For more breakdowns like this, I’m tracking the story in real time on TikTok and Youtube.
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