Instagram co-founders unveil Artifact, a social app for news reading

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram who left the social media giant Meta in September 2018, announced that they have launched a new venture to explore next-gen social apps and unveiled their first project ‘’Artifact’’, a personalized news reader app powered by machine learning.

As reported by The Verge, the Artifact app, named after the combination of ‘’article’’, ‘’fact’’ and ‘’artificial intelligence’’, hasn’t been publicly launched yet, but those who’d like to participate in its private beta can join its waitlist. 

When a user opens the app for the first time, Artifact will show them a curated selection of news stories from big publishers like the New York Times as well as smaller ones. Quite similar to TikTok, the app will personalize their experience once they start engaging with those articles, and show them stories that might draw their attention more through the use of machine learning. It will also offer social features like commenting, following feeds of users you follow as well as their comments on the posts, and sending direct messages to have a more private conversation with them.

In fact, there are many RSS reader & news aggregator apps that already offer similar personalized experiences and have large user bases, such as Google News, Apple News, Pocket, Flipboard, Newsbreak and SmartNews. Given that today’s users, especially Gen Z, are also used to accessing news on social platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, whether such an app would have a major footprint in the market remains a question for now.

Also Read: 33% of TikTok users in the US get news on the app, up 50% from 2020

Systrom and Krieger haven’t disclosed when they plan to launch Artifact publicly since they’re still developing it. Meanwhile, they also added that they’re interested in revenue-sharing deals with news publishers.