Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), announced over the weekend that the company has discovered and is working to restore the video archive for Vine, the popular short-form video application. The archive, previously thought to be deleted, will soon have user access restored.
Vine, known for its six-second looping videos, was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million, aimed at expanding the social media platform’s video capabilities. However, the app’s potential was not fully realized, leading to its shutdown in 2016 by restricting new uploads. By 2017, Vine was fully discontinued, though a user archive remained accessible for a period.
Despite its discontinuation and absence from app stores, Vine continues to hold a significant place in internet culture. Its content lives on through online compilations on platforms like YouTube and through the careers of creators who began on the platform, reaching new generations.
Musk had previously shown interest in reviving Vine after acquiring Twitter in October 2022. He conducted a poll asking, “Bring back Vine?”, to which nearly 70% of respondents voted “yes.” At the time, Axios reported that Twitter had even assigned engineers to a Vine reboot project, although it never materialized.
While the immediate focus is on restoring the archive, Musk’s broader ambitions for video creation appear to be shifting. In the same announcement about Vine, he highlighted Grok’s new video-creation feature, Grok Imagine, available to X Premium+ subscribers, calling it “AI Vine.” This suggests a potential pivot towards AI-generated content rather than human-made videos.
The actual delivery of this promise to restore the Vine archive remains to be seen. Some observers suggest the announcement could also serve as a strategy to draw attention to Grok AI, rather than indicating a concrete effort within the company to make old Vines available for reposting.
