Proof Of Life: Divine Wants To Verify That Everything You Scroll Was Actually Made By A Person

A new social media application called Divine, developed as a reboot of the defunct Vine platform, was released to the public in late April 2026. Backed by Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit “and Other Stuff,” the app revives the six-second looping video format while positioning itself as an antidote to the increasingly synthetic, algorithmically degraded state of modern social media.

There is something radical about a platform that opens with a simple promise: everything here was made by a human being. In an online environment where around 87% of marketers used generative AI in at least one recurring workflow as of early 2026 and many fast-growing YouTube channels rely solely on AI-generated media, the emergence of Divine feels less like a nostalgia project and more like a considered act of resistance. The app brings back the format that defined a generation of internet creativity — Vine’s six-second looping videos — but its real significance lies in what it refuses to accommodate.

Divine was created by Evan Henshaw-Plath, known online as Rabble, an early Twitter employee who recovered roughly 500,000 archived Vine videos from large binary backup files, restoring user engagement data such as views, likes, and comments alongside the clips themselves. The initiative was funded by Dorsey’s nonprofit, which supports experimental open-source projects without seeking financial returns. For Dorsey, the venture represents a correction of what many consider one of his more consequential missteps: the shuttering of Vine in 2017. The app is now available on the App Store, Google Play, and the decentralised Zapstore.

The AI Slop Problem Nobody Wants To Name

The broader context in which Divine is launching is difficult to ignore. Over 500,000 deepfakes were shared on social media in 2023, and projected figures for 2025 reached 8 million in circulation, according to aggregated industry detection data. Meanwhile, 79% of creators report that AI enables them to produce more content faster, while 65% rely on it for at least half of their posts. The consequence is a feed environment that many users have begun describing with the term “AI slop” — a torrent of synthetic, low-effort content that crowds out original human work.

YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X are all heavily intertwined with generative AI, as their parent companies seek to profit from the technology. These platforms are now grappling with a self-created dilemma: having encouraged AI content production to drive engagement and advertising revenue, they are finding it increasingly difficult to filter out material that erodes the very trust that keeps users coming back. Content identified by audiences as AI-generated sees a 12% engagement penalty on average, suggesting that users do notice and do care, even if platforms have been slow to act. Most major platforms — Instagram, YouTube, TikTok — permit AI-generated content and rely on labelling rather than outright exclusion, a strategy that focuses on disclosure rather than prevention.

Divine’s Harder Line

Where those broader industry efforts focus on labelling, Divine takes a harder stance: AI content is barred outright. The mechanism for enforcing this is not a simple checkbox or a passive reporting system, but a technical framework. Divine requires users to either record videos directly in the app or verify how uploaded videos were created using C2PA, an open industry standard that establishes the origin and the edits to digital content. This standard, already adopted by organisations such as Adobe, the BBC, and several major news agencies, embeds invisible provenance data into media files at the point of capture, making it verifiable rather than self-declared.

Alongside C2PA, the platform employs what it calls “proof mode,” an open-source verification tool developed by The Guardian Project and used by human rights organisations and journalists to authenticate sensitive media. If a video lacks the embedded provenance markers that confirm its authenticity, it simply cannot be uploaded. The team has acknowledged that this places constraints on professional creators who rely on third-party editing applications such as CapCut — although a handful of tools, including Adobe Premiere, are already compatible with the standard. The position of the platform is clear: compatibility will expand as more software adopts content verification technology, but the core requirement will not be relaxed.

The platform also deploys a multi-layered detection approach to identify AI-generated content that might otherwise slip through, and gives users greater agency over their algorithmic feeds. Rather than relying on a single engagement-optimised recommendation engine of the kind that drives behaviour on larger platforms, Divine allows users to choose from multiple algorithms within a broader ecosystem. This is not merely an aesthetic preference; it is a structural decision aimed at reducing the incentive to chase virality at the expense of authenticity.

Built on the open social protocol Nostr, with potential future integration of both the AT Protocol that powers Bluesky and ActivityPub, which underpins Mastodon and Meta’s Threads, Divine is designed to prevent the kind of platform lock-in that has historically left creators vulnerable to policy changes, algorithmic shifts, and outright shutdowns. As the company puts it: “Your account, your feed, your audience, your data. Not locked inside someone else’s platform.” The app operates as a public benefit corporation with no advertising revenue model, leaving monetisation to the creators themselves through direct support, brand collaborations, and a potential future Pro account tier.

Whether Divine can sustain itself against the scale of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts — the latter averaging more than 200 billion daily views — is a question that cannot be answered yet. What it represents, though, is a coherent and technically grounded argument that social media does not have to be the way it currently is. The dream of “joyscrolling instead of doomscrolling,” as Henshaw-Plath has described it, is an old one. Divine is at least attempting to build the infrastructure that might make it real.

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