(NewsNation) — Jack Dorsey, the former head of Twitter who killed short-video app Vine back in 2016, is reviving it nearly a decade later — kind of.
The reboot app, DiVine, will give users access to an archive of 100,000 Vine videos. It will also allow users to create and post new six-second loops.
Financed by Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” diVine has a staunch anti-AI policy. When generative AI content is suspected, the app will flag and prevent it from being posted.
Other social media apps, like Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, label AI when it’s detected — but the posts go up anyway.
“Experience the raw, unfiltered creativity of real people sharing genuine moments in 6-second loops,” the app’s website advertises. “Built on decentralized technology, owned by no one, controlled by everyone.”
When parent company Twitter shuttered Vine in 2016, archival groups backed up some of its millions of users’ content. Evan Henshaw-Plath, an Other Stuff employee who goes by Rabble, told TechCrunch the massive archives — which wouldn’t be accessible to everyday users — inspired an entirely new app altogether.
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” he told the outlet. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”
Dorsey’s new project comes months after Elon Musk announced he wanted to bring back Vine “but in AI form.”
While Musk’s August announcement never had a follow-up, diVine seems aimed to be the opposite of Musk’s promised resurrection.