Proof Of Life: Divine Wants To Verify That Everything You Scroll Was Actually Made By A Person
A new social media software known as Divine, developed as a reboot of the defunct Vine platform, was launched to the general public in late April 2026. Backed by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” the app revives the six-second looping video format whereas positioning itself as an antidote to the more and more artificial, algorithmically degraded state of recent social media.
There is one thing radical a few platform that opens with a easy promise: the whole lot right here was made by a human being. In a web-based setting the place round 87% of entrepreneurs used generative AI in at the very least one recurring workflow as of early 2026 and lots of fast-growing YouTube channels rely solely on AI-generated media, the emergence of Divine feels much less like a nostalgia venture and extra like a thought of act of resistance. The app brings again the format that outlined a technology of web creativity — Vine’s six-second looping movies — however its actual significance lies in what it refuses to accommodate.
Divine was created by Evan Henshaw-Plath, recognized on-line as Rabble, an early Twitter worker who recovered roughly 500,000 archived Vine movies from giant binary backup recordsdata, restoring consumer engagement information corresponding to views, likes, and feedback alongside the clips themselves. The initiative was funded by Dorsey’s nonprofit, which helps experimental open-source initiatives with out searching for monetary returns. For Dorsey, the enterprise represents a correction of what many think about one among his extra consequential missteps: the shuttering of Vine in 2017. The app is now obtainable on the App Store, Google Play, and the decentralised Zapstore.
The AI Slop Problem Nobody Wants To Name
The broader context through which Divine is launching is tough to disregard. Over 500,000 deepfakes had been shared on social media in 2023, and projected figures for 2025 reached 8 million in circulation, in accordance with aggregated trade detection information. Meanwhile, 79% of creators report that AI allows them to supply extra content material sooner, whereas 65% depend on it for at the very least half of their posts. The consequence is a feed setting that many customers have begun describing with the time period “AI slop” — a torrent of artificial, low-effort content material that crowds out authentic human work.
YouTube, TikTookay, Instagram, and X are all closely intertwined with generative AI, as their guardian corporations search to revenue from the expertise. These platforms at the moment are grappling with a self-created dilemma: having inspired AI content material manufacturing to drive engagement and promoting income, they’re discovering it more and more tough to filter out materials that erodes the very belief that retains customers coming again. Content recognized by audiences as AI-generated sees a 12% engagement penalty on common, suggesting that customers do discover and do care, even when platforms have been gradual to behave. Most main platforms — Instagram, YouTube, TikTookay — allow AI-generated content material and depend on labelling somewhat than outright exclusion, a method that focuses on disclosure somewhat than prevention.
Divine’s Harder Line
Where these broader trade efforts give attention to labelling, Divine takes a tougher stance: AI content material is barred outright. The mechanism for imposing this isn’t a easy checkbox or a passive reporting system, however a technical framework. Divine requires customers to both report movies immediately within the app or confirm how uploaded movies had been created utilizing C2PA, an open trade commonplace that establishes the origin and the edits to digital content material. This commonplace, already adopted by organisations corresponding to Adobe, the BBC, and a number of other main information companies, embeds invisible provenance information into media recordsdata on the level of seize, making it verifiable somewhat than self-declared.
Alongside C2PA, the platform employs what it calls “proof mode,” an open-source verification software developed by The Guardian Project and utilized by human rights organisations and journalists to authenticate delicate media. If a video lacks the embedded provenance markers that verify its authenticity, it merely can’t be uploaded. The staff has acknowledged that this locations constraints on skilled creators who depend on third-party enhancing purposes corresponding to CapCut — though a handful of instruments, together with Adobe Premiere, are already appropriate with the usual. The place of the platform is evident: compatibility will increase as extra software program adopts content material verification expertise, however the core requirement is not going to be relaxed.
The platform additionally deploys a multi-layered detection method to establish AI-generated content material that may in any other case slip via, and provides customers better company over their algorithmic feeds. Rather than counting on a single engagement-optimised suggestion engine of the type that drives behaviour on bigger platforms, Divine permits customers to select from a number of algorithms inside a broader ecosystem. This just isn’t merely an aesthetic choice; it’s a structural choice aimed toward decreasing the motivation to chase virality on the expense of authenticity.
Built on the open social protocol Nostr, with potential future integration of each the AT Protocol that powers Bluesky and ActivityPub, which underpins Mastodon and Meta’s Threads, Divine is designed to forestall the form of platform lock-in that has traditionally left creators susceptible to coverage adjustments, algorithmic shifts, and outright shutdowns. As the corporate places it: “Your account, your feed, your viewers, your information. Not locked inside another person’s platform.” The app operates as a public profit company with no promoting income mannequin, leaving monetisation to the creators themselves via direct assist, model collaborations, and a possible future Pro account tier.
Whether Divine can maintain itself in opposition to the size of TikTookay, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts — the latter averaging greater than 200 billion each day views — is a query that can’t be answered but. What it represents, although, is a coherent and technically grounded argument that social media doesn’t should be the way in which it at the moment is. The dream of “joyscrolling as a substitute of doomscrolling,” as Henshaw-Plath has described it, is an outdated one. Divine is at the very least making an attempt to construct the infrastructure that may make it actual.
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