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Elon Musk Polls Twitter Followers About Bringing Back Vine

Twitter acquired the short video service in 2012, before shutting it down in 2017.

Sarah Lord Writer
Sarah Lord covers TVs and home entertainment. Prior to joining CNET, Sarah served as the tech and electronic reviews fellow at Insider, where she wrote about everything from smart watches and wearables to tablets and e-readers. She began her career by writing laptop reviews as an intern and subsequent freelancer at Tom's Hardware. She is also a professional actor with many credits in theater, film and television.
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Vine logo displayed on a phone screen and a laptop keyboard

Could Vine grow back?

 Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Elon Musk's short reign as chief twit has been eventful. The billionaire businessman closed a deal Thursday to buy the social media company. By Monday, he'd already fired top executives, revamped the home page, tweeted and then deleted misinformation and floated the possibility of charging for Twitter verification. 

And now, he's asking his followers if he should bring back Vine, the short-video service that Twitter purchased in 2012 before its official launch in 2013, but then shut down in 2017. 

In a Sunday night tweet, Musk wrote "Bring back Vine?" with a poll offering a binary yes or no choice. As of Monday morning, the poll has over 3 million responses, and nearly 70% want the service to return.

Vine was one of the first social networks to focus on short-form user-created videos. Vine videos were limited to six seconds and were particularly popular with teens and young adults.

Social media sites like Snapchat and Instagram have since successfully integrated video into their platforms, while TikTok is comprised solely of user-generated videos. 

A new version of Vine would face stiff competition. TikTok has over a billion active users a month, while Instagram boasts over 2 billion users.