Tati Bruening was once the textbook example of an Instagram user. Since the pandemic, she has been building her career as a photographer on the platform and attracted hundreds of thousands of followers in the process. But recently, her relationship with Instagram started to change.

On Monday, Bruening shared a post on the platform calling to "Make Instagram Instagram again." She told CNN Business that she was scrolling the app and felt frustrated by the lack of content she was seeing from accounts she followed in the wake of recent updates prioritizing recommended posts and videos from its Reels product.

"I was seeing a post from my friend underneath three Reels and a recommended post that was six days old," she said. As she put it in her post: "Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends."

Her post blew up. By Tuesday morning, it had more than 1.7 million likes, thanks in part to shares by two of the most influential figures on the platform: Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner. The famous half-sisters are among the most-followed accounts on Instagram, with 360 million and 326 million followers, respectively, and their opinions carry big weight in the world of social media. A February 2018 tweet from Jenner criticizing a Snapchat redesign was credited with wiping out $1.3 billion from the company's value in a week.

The attention to Bruening's post reflects the growing backlash against recent updates to the Instagram platform, which boast more than 1 billion users. To beat back the competitive threat of TikTok — whose discovery algorithm is viewed as its great competitive advantage — Instagram has started showing users a much greater proportion of recommended content from accounts that they don't follow versus posts from their friends. It has also prioritized video content over the photos it is known for. The platform has been testing showing full-screen posts, much like TikTok, as well.

The issue has arguably been brewing for years. Since 2020, the company has been experimenting with showing users more "suggested posts" in their feeds. Recommended content and ads now make up a significant portion of the Instagram feed, which often pigeonholes users into certain content categories (such as recipes or relationship advice) in a way that sometimes seems to disregard whether they actually follow such accounts.

The latest dust-up around Instagram comes at a fragile time for parent company Meta. The company is grappling with an aging and stagnating user base on its flagship Facebook platform, and Instagram is largely seen as the best bet of its family of apps to maintain and grow the crucial younger audience. But Meta, like many older players in the social media world, is facing steep competition from TikTok and is fighting to gain traction in its attempts to copy it.

While Instagram users are somewhat more likely to open the app daily, TikTok users spend an average of about 45 more minutes per day on the app than people do on Instagram, according to a report from research firm Sensor Tower for the second quarter of 2022. In a February call with Wall Street analysts, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Instagram Reels "face a competitor in TikTok that is a lot bigger, so it will take a while to ... catch up there."

At the same time, Meta is relying on profits from Instagram and its other apps to help fund its investment in building a future version of the internet it calls the "metaverse." And the company, which is set to report second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, may see a slowdown in spending on ads, its core business, amid rising inflation and recession fears.

Meta's stock fell nearly 3% Tuesday after the growing backlash from the Kardashians and others.

"The problem for Meta is that nothing is good right now," said D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte. "Instagram is meant to be the Meta asset to exploit, to address the younger market, so it's natural to me that they're using Instagram as the way to respond to the competitive threat of TikTok."

Meta has run this playbook before. In 2016, months before Snapchat's parent company made its Wall Street debut, Instagram copied one of the messaging app's signature features, Stories. Instagram, soon reached more users with its version of the feature than Snapchat did. But its efforts to copy TikTok with Reels have arguably proven to be more difficult.

Many have pointed out that videos on Reels are often just old TikTok videos — sometimes shared weeks after they first went viral on TikTok, and occasionally with the TikTok logo still attached. In some cases, users will share a still photo set to music as a Reel in an effort to rank higher on the platform. Instagram, for its part, has been trying to incentivize users to make original Reels, with creator fund programs and by featuring them prominently in-feed. The company is now also testing sharing all videos shorter than 15 minutes as Reels.

To be sure, Instagram is not the only platform prioritizing video and recommended content as it seeks to keep up with TikTok, which last year surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms have all also taken steps in that direction.

"The viewpoint is that this is like mobile, meaning it's an evolutionary change in consumption on the internet," Forte said. "What choice does Facebook have? It would be nearly impossible to buy TikTok, which was the old playbook, so now they have to try to innovate."

For creators like Breuning who built their livelihoods on Instagram, the changes feel especially painful, given its origin as a photo app that catered to artists and photographers.

"It feels wrong to switch the algorithm on creators that have made a living and contributed to the community, forcing them to change their entire content direction and lifestyle to serve a new algorithm," Bruening wrote in a change.org petition calling on Instagram to "Stop trying to be TikTok!" It has garnered more than 150,000 signatures in four days.

Instagram did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. However, Instagram head Adam Mosseri addressed the criticism in a video post on the platform Tuesday.

"We're experimenting with a number of different changes to the app and so we're hearing a lot of concerns from all of you," he said, acknowledging complaints about the shift to video and the increase in recommended content. "We're going to continue to support photos, they're part of our heritage. ... That said, I need to be honest: I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time."

Mosseri continued: "If you look at what people share on Instagram, that's shifting more and more to videos over time. If you look at what people like and consume and view on Instagram, that's also shifting more and more to video over time, even if we're not changing anything. So we're going to have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos."

Mosseri also warned that the full-screen video feature test is "not yet good" and has only rolled out to a small percentage of users. And he pointed to the option Instagram launched earlier this year for users to toggle the platform to a chronological feed of posts from only accounts they follow.

But that explanation wasn't enough to silence the criticisms. Some users sounded off in the comments about feeling like they had no choice but to start making more videos if they wanted the platform's algorithm to surface their content. Others suggested that if the platform became too much like TikTok, they'd be inclined to simply pick one of the apps to use rather than both.

"People do VIDEOS because we have no reach on our photos!!" fashion creator Alina Tanasa (@fabmusealina) said in a comment on Mosseri's video. "As a content creator I need and want each and with photos you cut all the reach and you promote only videos. So it's not us, it's you that are changing everything and are afraid of TikTok."

Makeup influencer James Charles, who has nearly 23 million Instagram followers, added in a comment: "I understand that every business has to evolve, compete, and please investors, but Instagram is losing the competition and has lost its identity along the way. ... We're upset because we CARE about this app and the communities we've been able to create/join on here, but I'm genuinely worried that if something doesn't change, there will be no community left."

If there's a silver lining for Instagram, however, it's that there are few other photo-first apps out there, making it easier to criticize Instagram than leave it, especially for those who have built a life and a livelihood on it.

"Me personally," Breuning said, "I love Instagram and I don't plan on leaving Instagram anytime soon."

BOSTON, Mass. — Often known as the silent killer, kidney disease impacts an estimated 35 million Americans.

Now, there's a new Smartphone app aiming to help break down barriers and diagnose patients early.

Paula LeClair is with a company called Healthy.io. A few weeks ago their app, "Minuteful Kidney: Home Urine Test," received FDA clearance. No trip to the doctor's office is needed.

"What we want to do is test everyone early and the earliest easiest way to do that is through the urine," LeClair said.

Instead, using a urine sample at home, people can run a screening test using their smartphone. Results usually appear in less than a minute.

"It’s not until late stages that they become symptomicatic, if they become, they are close to needing dialysis or a transplant," LeClair added.

There are broader implications to all this as well. People of color are four times more likely to have chronic kidney disease. The hope is that by breaking down barriers, especially for people who may not have access to a primary care provider, early detection can still be possible.

"It's such a large problem," she noted.

While this is the first app of its kind to be FDA approved for at-home kidney screenings, it's part of a growing list of FDA-approved mobile medical apps, including EKG readers, blood-pressure cuffs and pulse oximeters.

In recent years, the Olympic games have become a target for cyber espionage, surveillance and other financially-motivated attacks. 

The NTT Corporation, which provided network security for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, said there were more than 450 million cyberattacks launched during the 16 days of competition.

That's 2.5 times more than the number of attacks on the 2012 London Olympics.

Beijing won’t be much different.

A report from cybersecurity analysis firm Recorded Future found ransomware groups may try to encrypt machines used at the games, in part because it could lead to a significant profit, given that teams or officials might need to pay ransom to regain access to those systems as soon as possible. 

But experts think the biggest threat is possible cyber espionage and surveillance of athletes and visitors by the Chinese government.

The United States, Team Great Britain, Australia, Germany and Netherlands all urged their athletes and visitors to leave their personal phones and laptops back at home out of fear that they will be monitored by the government at the games and thereafter. 

"China's national security laws create a really different environment for privacy than what people are used to when they're in other countries, where privacy legislation places significant constraints on the government's ability to collect and use data," Robert Potter, CEO and co-founder of Internet 2.0 said.

"The identifiers for your phone are automatically collected, so that information is gone the moment you hit a mobile phone tower in China."

Potter's cybersecurity company Internet 2.0 examined some of the software being provided by official sponsors to the game and found that the Virtual Private Network service offered to athletes, which lets users hide and protect their internet traffic from being accessed by third parties, collected a "significant amount of user data" beyond what was needed to run the app. 

Newsy's research showed the camera and photo libraries were required to be accessed by the app, and they just didn't seem to be a particularly good reason or justifiable reason to think that that was normal for a VPN application.  

A separate report from Citizen Lab found serious privacy issues with the MY2022 Olympics app, which is required to be used by all attendees at the Beijing games.

For example, it contained an encryption flaw that could expose passport details and medical information of users. 

Both the IOC and Beijing Olympic Committee have rejected claims that there are security concerns with the MY2022 Olympics App. 

Experts told Newsy the only sure-fire way that visitors to the Olympics can protect themselves is by using new devices and accounts only while inside China in order to protect their personal information, then throw the devices away after the games are over.

China is committed to having open and accessible internet available to athletes that are within the "COVID bubble," but there is a line between open internet access and unmonitored internet access — and China is making no guarantees around the latter. 

This story was first reported by Tyler Adkisson at Newsy.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Markeisha Harris-Minor is a young entrepreneur who has always considered herself to be a resource to people. And she has always wanted to do it, as she says, on a macro level.

So, last December, she came up with an idea for a new app she calls Blocal Search.

What is it?

“This is a nationwide directory and app for locating Black-owned businesses all across the country," Harris-Minor, CEO of Blocal Search, said.

Harris-Minor said she was constantly seeing the Black dollar recycle in front of her eyes. That’s why she said it was important for her to find an avenue that would allow the money to stay in local neighborhoods, especially in a moment in time where a demand to support Black businesses is on the rise.

“Because we all know that buying Black right now, it’s something that’s important. It may look more trendy or what have you, but I want to make sure I’m pushing it to be a lifestyle, so just kind of changing that focus and perspective, like why am I really buying Black?” she said.

Ajay Brewer, owner of Brewer’s Café on the city’s south side, added his business to Blocal Search this year.

“I’ve had several people tell me that they’ve found me through Blocal, so any sort of search engine that creates that sort of awareness for us is really priceless. It’s created revenue for Brewer’s Café for sure," Brewer said.

Harris-Minor said she has over 150 local businesses -- like restaurants, juice bars, beauty supplies, family dentistry, and more -- in the app.

The number is even higher nationwide. Blocal has promoted about 4,000 companies across 160 cities since the app launched in February.

“Blocal at minimum is going to be a directory, but this is going to be a brand that I’m building to really make sure that we’re able to have a sustainable community that we’ve had in the past and be able to create the generational wealth that we all are looking for our families,” she said.

Blocal Search is available to download on your phone by going to your App Store or on Google Play. You can also get more information here.

This story was originally published by Rob Desir at WTVR.

There's a silver lining for one nonprofit with the frenzy around the Robinhood stock trading app that's now facing dozens of lawsuits after the company restricted trading on GameStop.

Robin Hood, an organization that has been fighting poverty in New York City for 32 years, is welcoming the new attention.

The organization initially got confused for the stock trading app on social media, which led to some angry comments directed at the nonprofit. But it has also led to an increase in donations when people realized the nonprofit's mission.

Their CEO, Wes Moore, says they've received hundreds of donations in the last few days from across 29 states.

“It’s also provided an opportunity for people just to learn more about the work, to learn more about why an organization like ours exists and why this issue of poverty, this issue of entrenched poverty in many ways is something that everyone should be spending and focusing their time,” said Moore.

The CEO says the last year has really shown the extent of the challenges we were already facing with poverty.

Robin Hood launched a relief fund during the pandemic that has been supporting social services in New York City and offering cash assistance.

“A core focus of our work is not just addressing the very human need right now, but it's also understanding the fact that the reason that we have such a significant human need oftentimes is because of holes in policies,” said Moore.

One policy they're advocating to change right now is the child tax credit. Some families are missing out on this, because their earnings are too low to qualify.

President Joe Biden’s stimulus proposal would fix this by expanding the credit for one year and making it fully refundable.

Robin Hood is also pushing for the credit to be permanent.