It was an opportunity too good for Meta to ignore: On January 19, TikTok, one of biggest rival of social mediais set to go dark across the United States when a new national security law became effective. In the days and weeks before the ban, while millions of Americans struggled to find a suitable alternative to TikTok, Meta found ways to promote Instagram and Facebook as an answer. The tech giant is making a sudden design tweak, rolling out new features, and running ads that all position its platforms—and especially its video product, Reels—as direct competitors of TikTok.

Instagram has scaled back in-app shopping initiatives in recent years, but on Friday, Meta showed off a new feature that appears to be taken directly from TikTok Shopthe massively successful TikTok ecommerce platform. In a promotional videotwo creative buyers who work for Meta explained how influencers can now “feature more prominently” in the products they market on Reels. Instead of putting a link to Amazon or Walmart in the comments, they can add a banner that directs viewers to click on the item under their videos—similar to how it works in the TikTok Shop.

Meta’s other efforts are similarly focused. Before TikTok stopped working for almost 14 hours on Saturday, some people reported that among the last things they saw on the platform were sponsored posts for Instagram. “No wonder, as TikTok went down tonight, Meta flooded my FYP with ads for Instagram,” one person said in a post on Bluesky, referring to TikTok’s AI-powered For You Page feed . “In my last hour on TikTok I saw ads for instagram,” said another person on Threads.

TikTok’s Ad Library, a transparency tool that allows anyone to find out which paid campaigns are running on the platform, shows that Meta is running dozens of sponsored videos on Instagram and Reels in January that were collectively viewed by millions of users. But the tool includes data from only a select number of countries—mostly in Europe—and doesn’t cover what ads are seen by TikTok users in the United States. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Facebook, many people reported seeing a different promotion appear in their news feeds last week, encouraging them to link their TikTok accounts to their Facebook pages. “Build your social presence on apps by showing your TikTok profile link and follower count on your Facebook Page,” one version of the message read.

Given the time, “it feels a little passive aggressive,” one user wrote to X along with a screenshot of the flag. “Facebook is trolling users by suggesting we add our TikTok accounts to our Facebook pages,” another person joked.

The prompt seems to be connected to a ABOUT Meta launched last month allowing users to display their YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram handles and follower counts on Facebook. However, the banner that people have reported seeing in recent days only mentions TikTok by name. The feature makes it easy for creators’ followers on other platforms to find and follow them on Facebook.