I have lamented the demise of Vine, the short-video-generating app once attached to Twitter yet shut down by the platform several years ago. I am not alone in my mourning. It is also missed by the Millennials and Zoomers who have compiled the app’s greatest hits on YouTube. And even those involved in the decision to kill the app now have regrets, especially as they have beheld the rise of the similar (but evil) Chinese app TikTok in Vine’s absence.
I have gone so far as to argue that there is a national-security case for using government resources to revive Vine, given TikTok’s growing influence over American life — 26 percent of Americans under age 30 regularly get their news from it! — at the same time that it retains sketchy ties with the Chinese government. (See this post from last year and this speech I gave last week for an elaboration of my case.) Free-market economists, including Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, have acknowledged that national-security concerns can create a reasonable exception to the general preference for free markets — though this can of course be abused, and often is.
Preferably, market forces will resurrect Vine. Axios reports that Elon Musk, now the owner of Twitter, is looking into reviving Vine, possibly as early as the end of this year.
I have mixed feelings about Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and about Twitter generally. But the return of Vine would be welcome, for both entertainment and national-security purposes.