This is the first TMID that I’m sending in a post-Dolly world. I grew up on Dolly and it’s tough to imagine a world without her. But she’d want us to keep going, talking about digital, I guess.

Let me pour myself a cup of ambition and get back to August.

Ryan

PS: I’m writing a strategy piece on creators and end-of-year giving for the People First newsletter that comes out on Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it.

The Month in Digital | August 2026

Big Picture

• Meta To Pay $17B Over Social Media Addiction: “In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising…. The settlement could signal an inflection point for a social media industry that has largely escaped regulatory scrutiny over the harms its products have caused children. The amount, paid in installments over 10 years, is one of the highest ever reached by a tech company to states.” + “61% say social media companies need firmer oversight, including 71% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans”

• Clear and scary explanation of the Hugging Face hack on Ezra’s pod. Plus, what surprised a key AI researcher about the hack: “This incident was far more severe than I expected, and far more severe than previous publicly documented misalignment incidents, both in terms of how concerning the agents’ motives were and the feats they achieved in pursuit of those motives.”

• “We gave the same fictional chocolate brand to 7 Instagram accounts, some run by human social media managers, some run by AI. And we let them compete.

  The humans won. They out-engaged the AI accounts 2.45x, a 1.88% engagement rate versus 0.77%, even though the AI accounts had no shortage of reach to work with. The gap came down largely to conversation.”

• This Swindled podcast episode tells the unbelievable story of how eBay corporate went after two small-time journalistic critics.

• Developing taste in the age of algorithmic slop.

• Quick Tactical Links:

  • Social media tools to help with FINRA, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance.

• New Social Platform Watch:

  • Devine went public in August and folks talked about it for about 6 seconds.

  • Will Myspace really return?

The State of Digital

• “The report finds that of the 6.7 hours Americans spend daily with TV and video content, 26% goes to creators, compared with 35% for linear TV and 33% for streaming platforms. Combined, linear and streaming still account for 68% of daily viewing, which VAB frames as ‘Premium Video Platforms.’”

• Pew Research: “In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released.”

• Microdramas FAQ: “Global microdrama revenues reached $11 billion in 2025 and are projected to hit $14 billion in 2026, per Omdia. The US is forecast to account for 50% of all microdrama revenues outside China in 2026, reaching $1.5 billion. Adoption is scaling quickly. Microdrama app downloads surged past 2.3 billion globally in 2025, more than doubling from the prior year, while traditional streaming app downloads fell more than 4%. App revenues reflect the same trajectory: in-app revenues for ReelShort and DramaBox grew 31% and 29% respectively in Q1 2025, reaching $130 million and $120 million.” + “A lot of the American microdramas I’ve watched are like sub-CW-level productions about teenagers with werewolf boyfriends. In other words, they’re like everything else you see on social media right now: Worthless, but addicting audiovisual goonslop.”

• “Eight months after the ban rolled out in Australia, 26% of 13–15s are back on TikTok. That’s just 1% below the level before the restrictions began.”

• “Zuckerberg, in sum, is the inverse of Dolly Parton: almost nobody likes him, regardless of their political leanings… The dichotomy is incredible. Parton boasted 78% favorability among Democrats… and 73% favorability among Republicans. As expected, she’s pretty much universally adored. Zuckerberg, by contrast, had just 8% favorability among Democrats, and 13% among Republicans.”

• “TikTok leads the short-video views by a wide margin, generating 42.6% more views than Instagram and 518.3% more than YouTube.”

• “Jackson and his colleagues analyzed more than 2 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities and found that both threads and communities became more negative over time, and that semantic differentiation drove that trend — that is, negative comments were more semantically unique from what had already been said. They then replicated their observational findings with an experiment that showed that social media users who were primed to be unique posted more negative comments than users who were primed to conform.”

Influencers/Creators

• “Prioritize content over followers: Follower counts are no longer a reliable indicator of reach. Modern recommendation feeds decouple audience size from distribution. Only 17% of consumers check a creator’s follower count before deciding to engage and audiences prioritize subject relevance and content style.”

• “As the creator economy matures, marketers are backing into the brief — making the brand fit into the creator’s existing world rather than boxing creators into a fully formed brand campaign.” But: “Brands increasingly rely on influencers to reach audiences through content that feels authentic, but overly prescriptive brand demands can undermine the authenticity that makes creator partnerships valuable in the first place.”

• “The White House has bypassed traditional press relations while assuming an unorthodox approach to media that puts itself in the role of content creator.” + “The Pentagon has reportedly hired conservative military veterans with large social media followings to unspecified government positions.”

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI+

• 12 tips for writing like an LLM or how to generate a false Pangram positive. Also: “Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chatbots.”

• 33% of people who work in social media don't think labeling AI content is necessary / make crappy slop content.

• “Artificial intelligence-generated content is steadily overwhelming human-created posts across social apps. As a result, almost every platform is looking at restrictions on AI-generated content in order to maintain more meaningful connections among users.”

• Claude’s AI copy “watermarking” and more on the AI writing vibe shift. (All good news in here!)

• Tired of having friends and family? Have GPT respond to your iMessages.

• “In American terms, AI models are Democrats. With the exception of DeepSeek V3.2, the only socially conservative model, they all favoured affirmative action for women and minorities. Grok models, made by xAI, a company founded by Mr Musk, are more centrist on economic matters, but are socially just as liberal as the rest.”

Meta

• Data Centers Create Jobs: “Meta is testing robots that can plug in cables, reset servers, and handle other tasks inside its data centers, according to several current and former workers familiar with the projects. The ongoing effort, which has not been previously reported, may eventually allow Meta to operate its rapidly expanding data center footprint with fewer humans, keeping labor costs in check as its spending on AI infrastructure soars.”

• “Everything social teams need to know about boosting on Instagram and Facebook.” And, a sad day for paid media dorks like me: Meta is limiting ad placement settings.

• Copyright Hacking: “If you think someone wearing smart glasses is secretly recording you, start playing a Disney song.”

Instagram

• Reel Lurkers: Reels watchers outnumber Reels makers two to one.

• Instagram fixed what wasn’t broken with a new logo that says Instagzam.

• Repeatable Content: “Through Instagram’s brand-new Series feature, creators are encouraged to group related reels into structured collections, giving audiences a dedicated place to watch every episode in order, instead of manually hunting through a profile for series content. Think on-the-street interviews, news breakdowns, tutorials on specific skills, or any ongoing story that unfolds over multiple posts.”

• First Draft will make a quick edit of multiple videos in your camera roll to get that Reel first draft faster and without annoying intentionality.

• Relax: Most small businesses only need to post 3-5 times a week.

• Goodbye Manychat? Instagram testing new auto-DM feature for ad commenters.

• Tactical Tips: Editing good videos, getting more followers, & writing good captions.

WhatsApp

• WhatsApp adding new features to make group chats even more fun.

Facebook

• Aaron Sorkin offers some harsh words for Facebook in advance of what looks to be a terrible sequel to his classic The Social Network.

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

• Marvel, Disney, and Star Wars slop won’t just be produced by studios anymore but by amateurs on TikTok.

• TikTok audience isn’t as young as you may think: “36.5 million visitors ages 25 to 34 came to the platform in May 2026, compared with 24.5 million ages 18 to 24.” Relatedly, you can now set your legacy options so your great-grandchildren can still access your TikTok account after you die.

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV+

• The YouTube Primary: “Between late June and late July, ClarifyAI tallied some 877 negative or oppositional YouTube videos mentioning Stevens, while just 277 featured positive narratives or messages about the candidate. El-Sayed, on the other hand, saw 1,115 positive videos on YouTube compared to 577 negative ones.”

• YouTube, apparently thinking view count was too credible a metric, has further degraded its value by now counting a view from “the moment a video begins to play.”

• YouTube doesn’t believe in gatekeeping, unless it’s keeping smaller creators at the gates looking to get paid.

Partisan Networks: Bluesky & Truth Social+

• Truth API: “Two press organisations have asked a Manhattan federal court to shut down Truth API, the service launched this month that sells Wall Street firms faster access to US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts for up to $100,000 a month.”

Reddit, Discord+

• Sounds like an awful idea: “Reddit is taking a cue from TikTok to bring viral stories to life through video. On Thursday’s second-quarter earnings call, the company said it’s been working on a new ‘video Reddit’ experience that would not only allow users to watch videos from the platform, but also listen to posts in the background.”

Snapchat, BeReal, Divine+

• Snapchat has joined the fight against AI Slop, will prioritize “human-made” content.

• Snapchat trying to do the impossible: teach marketers to be funny.

Audio: Podcasts, Streaming Music, Audiobooks+

• “Podcasting has undergone a fundamental shift. What began as an audio-only medium now spans video formats, connected TV screens, and creator-driven content that rivals traditional television. YouTube users streamed over 700 million hours of video podcasts on their TVs in October 2025, nearly double the prior year.”

• “These warped incentives have helped create a new kind of nebulous podcast ideology: what might be called default epistemic conspiracism. It can be left-coded or right-coded, depending on the podcast creature, but ultimately the almighty algorithm is what guides the way. And what demonstrably generates the richest algorithmic rewards is conspiracism—defined not so much by belief in any one discrete conspiracy, but by a baseline epistemology that assumes everything is fake or staged, there is always some squalid coverup waiting to be unraveled, and a devious ‘they’ is always scheming in the shadows.”

Newsletters & Blogs: Substack, Beehiiv, Medium+

SEO / AI: GEO & AEO

• “Reddit accounted for an average 3.83% of ChatGPT Search citations from July 18 through Aug. 7… By Aug. 14, it had fallen below 1%, averaging just 0.52% through Monday, an 86.4% drop.”

• B2B Buyers Love AI: “92% say AI has shaped their vendor shortlist. 45% say it did so significantly.”

Still behind? Catch up with July’s Month In Digital.

It’s a Jimothy and Odysseus summer!

I’m sending this on Saturday afternoon from Mistral Nogal in Bogotá because I don’t want to have to think about it again this weekend.

Lots happened in July, and now you don’t have to wait until Monday to read about it.

Enjoy,

Ryan

The Month in Digital | July 2026

Big Picture

• The Uni-Context: “One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of ‘context collapse.’ If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room? Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else?”

• “Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.”

• Stop making us log in all the time: “You can hardly access anything without logging in, and if you can access the reddit thread or article or what have you, you will be prompted to open or download the app, which will then require you to log in. As someone who deleted their Twitter and Facebook accounts, I can no longer view even a public profile in its entirety. If I want to watch a TikTok on my browser (because I’m on my laptop or trying to get the link), I have to navigate the worst UX imaginable. These platforms will allow you to see something without logging in—Twitter, for instance, will show you a user’s most popular posts—but their message to casual browsers is clear with every App Store pop up and tedious design choice: We fucking hate you.”

• “In a nutshell: the internet is designed to make you misinformed, angry, and poor. But this, I want to argue in this piece, was not inevitable… Rather, the modern internet’s problems are specifically the result of design choices. This should be cause for some hope. If the internet’s problems are the product of our choices, then this means that we can make different, hopefully better, choices in the future.”

• New ways to think about social media brand fundamentals.

• Quick Tactical Links:

  • 11 Social Media Analytics Tools

  • Four Keys to a Smarter Clipping Strategy + Making experiences worth clipping.

  • A social media calendar so you never miss International Talk Like A Pirate Day again.

  • An excellent deep dive into the current state of social community management.

• New Social Platform Watch:

  • Meta launched Pocket, a vibe-coding mini-game social app.

  • Goose, a Grindr alternative, launched with promotion by AI slop models.

  • “A new media company called Eventual is launching in partnership with Polymarket to give the world's top prediction market traders a platform for news and analysis.”

The State of Digital

• “Meta remains the leader of the pack in terms of total social platform reach and usage, while Threads continues to gain on X and Pinterest continues to rise.”

• “Across 8 experiments and an analysis of 1m TikTok posts, researchers found that when people knew posts were created with AI, posts:

  • Received 7 to 8% fewer likes

  • They had 7% lower combined engagement (comments, shares) even if quality was the same

  • Creators were seen as putting 15.6% less effort into their work, and people felt 14.5% less connected to them”

• “As much as 41% of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.”

• Polling Gen Z:

  • “Nearly 80% of Gen Z Goes to Live Sports for Celebrities and Brand Activations”

  • Yelp Says: “Gen Z favors detailed written reviews over influencer recommendations for both dining out (78% vs. 59%) and service professionals (81% vs. 61%).”

  • “Gen Z doesn’t want to be treated as an audience, they need to be treated as co-creators. In our research, 87% said they want a role in the creative process with brands. That’s a staggering shift from traditional marketing assumptions.”

  • 26 more Gen Z statistics that matter to marketers.

• “US adult media consumption will reach 13 hours and 26 minutes per day in 2026, per EMARKETER’s US Time Spent With Media H2 2026 Update report. The increase was driven by generative AI platforms, which added a new block of screen time without reducing usage in other media categories.”

Influencers/Creators

• “If there is one thing we’d encourage other digital teams to think through, it’s this: stop trying to find the perfect messenger or get your talking points repeated word for word. Instead, become a resource. Help creators find the intersection between your issue and the communities they already know how to reach.”

• “Jellyfish… analyzed 27 million responses across seven AI assistants, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Meta AI, and Perplexity. Its finding is blunt: independent, niche creators are beating brand-owned content and celebrity influencers inside AI-generated answers.”

• “Zuhair Lakhani ​is creating an army of AI influencers and flooding feeds with ‘propaganda campaigns.’”

• WSJ: “Major brands including baby food maker Little Spoon, fitness chain SoulCycle and retailers American Eagle and Target in the past year have introduced initiatives that compensate budding creators for posting about or interacting with their brands online—a strategy that until recently was employed only by smaller brands that couldn’t afford the rate cards of bigger influencers. In some cases, people with as few as 500 followers can get in the game.” + Starbucks is paying their baristas to make short videos.

• Scam creators pretending to be rich: “Hustlebros and influencers use fake YouTube, OnlyFans, and Stripe dashboards as ‘proof’ that they’re rich in order to sell low-quality get-rich-quick courses in pyramid schemes. We show how easy it is to pretend like you’re rich, and how these strategies are used all over social media.”

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI+

• “Ask Claude to make a pamphlet critical of President Donald Trump or Britain’s King Charles III, and Anthropic’s chatbot would oblige. Prompted to do the same for Thailand’s king, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince or China’s leader, and the artificial intelligence model declined. It is a key finding from a Meta Oversight Board study released Thursday, showing that major AI systems, including those built in the U.S., are more likely to refuse to criticize restrictive leaders or governments. It raises concerns that the large language models powering chatbots and AI agents could be regurgitating and spreading government influence over online speech as the technology is increasingly adopted worldwide.”

• “The best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y… The prevalence of this device isn’t just anecdotal—it’s measurable. (Sorry.) Barron’s reported that its appearance in corporate communications more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2025. Researchers at Pangram, which makes an AI-detection tool, estimate that Not just X but Y sentences appear three times as often in AI writing as they do in human writing.”

• “Artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology, and policymakers must move equally quickly to figure out how to respond, a group of economists and researchers are warning.”

• “Google indexed Claude Chats because Anthropic didn’t block your private chats from search engines.”

• “A hotel being sued for mass food poisonings was described as ‘spotless’ and a resort where guests complained of sexual harassment by staff was praised for ‘friendly’ service by an AI intended to summarise millions of Tripadvisor reviews.”

• “AI ‘slop’ imagery—banal pictures or videos, generally characterized by a kind of airbrushed boring realism, a lifeless surrealism, or obvious errors, produced by image generators trained on stolen stock photos, illustrations, movies, photojournalism, and Instagram selfies—has been widely embraced by the American right. Researchers call its political deployment slopaganda. From Trump’s mocked-up Time cover that inspired the No Kings protests to videos of James Talarico supposedly singing pro-trans musical numbers to over-the-top attack ads, the right has swiftly taken to slapped-together AI deepfakes and other generated imagery to promote candidates, push narratives, and depict opponents in humiliating ways. While Republicans and Democrats are growing suspicious of AI at roughly the same pace, right-wing politicians and influencers have embraced AI slop in a way that the left has not. Why?”

Meta

• “Meta is pushing brands onto its AI ad tools. The results are a mess: Meta is leaning on advertisers to run their campaigns through its AI tools. Brands told Business Insider the results include gibberish copy, mangled images and products changed beyond recognition, and that Meta’s answer to the complaints is essentially: that’s on you.”

Instagram

• 8 July: “Meta’s new AI option allows remixes of public IG posts:

  The company’s updated image generation model lets users tag profiles and import visuals into its artificial intelligence visual creation tools.”
  12 July: “Meta removes Instagram’s AI remix option: Only two days after launch, the company disabled a feature that allowed users to integrate other people’s content into artificial intelligence-generated images.”

• Two experts on Carousel strategy: Rachel Karten and Jack Appleby.

• Instagram continuing to test ways to give you more control over your algorthrium.

• Expanding AI translation tools for Reels: “The platform’s interface allows creators to process captions and audio that makes it look and sound like the original poster is speaking.”

• You may soon have to pay extra for those Instagram AI tools you’re not using.

• Instagram’s 2026 Guide To Using Stories

• “Instagram has been running paid adverts promoting child sexual abuse material in India, a BBC Eye investigation has found.”

• “Is Manychat making comment sections less fun?: When I think about user behavior on social media, the first thing people typically do is open up the comment section to see how other people are reacting to the video they are watching. The comment section is oftentimes more fun than the original video, especially on a platform like TikTok where there are inside jokes and the ability to post screenshots. But as Manychat has taken over on Instagram it’s clear there’s some resentment of what the tool is doing to that experience.”

Threads

• Threads adds flair tags and live-chat co-hosts.

• New York Times: “Threads, Meta’s ‘Twitter Killer,’ Finds Its People: The social platform that Meta once positioned as a rival to Elon Musk’s X now has 500 million monthly users. It increasingly resembles Reddit.”

Facebook

• Building a brand on Facebook.

• “Facebook is planning some big changes to try and keep its users from jumping to rival social platforms like TikTok — changes that sound dubiously similar to becoming a TikTok clone… the platform will begin testing a ‘reimagined experience’ later this year that will put a subset of users into ‘full-screen video the moment they open the app.’

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

• The best times to post on TikTok.

• TikTok launched portal for video series called TikTok Minis Center.

• New York Times: “The Breakup Loop: Why the TikTok Algorithm May Keep You Heartbroken”

• “Progressive fears about TikTok takeover fail to materialize - Liberals worried the platform’s ownership change would skew its algorithm to promote more right-wing content. Data shows that has yet to happen.”

• TikTok launched a new agentic marketing hub: “Agentic Hub gives advertisers access to ready-to-use, first-party and third-party AI Skills designed to help with everyday marketing tasks, from campaign creation and creative generation to performance analysis and catalog management.”

• “That storytime TikTok is probably an ad: ‘UGC creators’ are posting fake skits about bad bosses and toxic mother-in-laws to sell products. Consumers are falling for it.”

• “In February, a supplement company called Humann sued a competitor called Ambrosia Brands because Ambrosia, through the supplement company called Rosabella, allegedly directed and influenced the creation of hundreds of TikTok Shop videos and ads featuring AI-generated “doctors” that oversold the supposed benefits of Rosabella’s products.”

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV+

• A guide to balancing YouTube Shorts and long-form content. + Tips on making good Shorts + 7 YouTube strategy tips

• “YouTube has reworked the guidance under its inauthentic content policy, breaking out three specific categories of video that will get creators’ channels demonetized:

  • Generic or Repetitive Content

  • Unsatisfying or Off-putting Content

  • AI Personas Related to Sensitive Topics"

• YouTube Shorts adding more photos to the feed.

• “Signing with Netflix doesn’t appear to cost creators their YouTube audience.”

• Streaming Shovelware: “Even though a Netflix show isn’t supported by the same revenue model as a YouTuber like MrBeast, the (losing) formula for producing content appears to be the same. They’re both using historical data to iterate and pump out videos that are, at first, equally popular, but eventually less sticky culturally and then eventually less popular. The shows and movies — or, for simplicity’s sake, content — that are actually doing well on platforms like Netflix paint an even more dire picture of what’s happening to the streamer’s audience.”

LinkedIn

• Guide to successful LinkedIn copywriting.

• Collaboration posts are live for many users on LinkedIn.

• “I feel like I’m in a fever dream: LinkedIn just introduced a ‘Seems like AI Slop’ button to allow users to report Sloprific posts on the platform.”

Twitter/X

• “X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, Community Notes, will be updated to send users direct messages alerting them whenever a post they have interacted with has received a correction.”

• “X launched a new video editor and recorder UI in the iOS version of its app. The updated editor includes a range of new additions, such as multi-language captions and green screen recording.” + A “livestream studio to simplify live broadcasts.”

• Building a brand on X.

Pinterest

• Pinterest says it’s time to update your catalogs. + 6 ways to Pinterest brand build.

• “Google launched an updated UI for Google Images, which makes the gallery look more akin to Pinterest.”

Reddit, Discord+

• “Discord has grown into a mainstream reach play, not just a gamer hangout... 64m unique US visitors in April 2026.”

• Reddit launched their first brand campaign, People Are Best, a “celebration of what real human connection makes possible on this platform. It's also a bet on something I believe is becoming rarer online by the day: an authentic experience.” + New “automated defenses to catch violating behavior before our communities ever see it. By deploying advanced AI tools, we’ve reduced user exposure to spam by 20%, revoked nearly 2M fake votes daily.”

Snapchat, BeReal, Divine+

• 4 tips for building out your Snapchat marketing strategy.

Audio: Podcasts, Streaming Music, Audiobooks+

• “The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds…”

• “Media consumers in the US tend to consider podcast ads less disruptive than ads in other media.” + “Audio podcasts generate the highest levels of trust and the lowest rates of skepticism of any ad-supported content format, but that trust converts into purchases and other actions at a lower rate than video podcasts.”

Newsletters & Blogs: Substack, Beehiiv, Medium+

• Substack launched a new AI detection tool, “to scan text to see how much of it was likely written by hand or with AI assistance.” It’s getting mixed reviews, but I’m all for it.

• Hootsuite’s Substack 101

Owned/Direct: Email, SMS, DMs, Signal, Etc..

• 11 ways to increase your email click-through rates.

• Message Slop: “But it wasn’t the Workslop itself that unnerved me the most—it was the emails, Slacks, and WhatsApp messages I’d been getting. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself on threads with three or four people who were all clearly copy-and-pasting from ChatGPT. It’s disorienting…”

• How we got the word “spam” for junk email.

SEO / AI: GEO & AEO

• “ChatGPT is responsible for about 1% of visits to brand websites…”

• Google Decentralized: “Content creators and publishers use many channels beyond their own websites to reach their audiences. As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives and different content formats, we want to make it easier for site owners and creators—even those without their own website—to get a consolidated view of how all of their content is getting discovered on Search.”

• The Intent Gap: “AI is shifting more than search. It is changing where customer intent is formed and making much of that process invisible to businesses.

  The organizations that adapt first will not necessarily have the most sophisticated AI models or the largest marketing budgets. They will be the ones that recognize a fundamental change in customer behavior: by the time many customers arrive, much of the decision-making is already complete.”

Gaming/Twitch

• 83% of US households played a video game device in the past year: “Total US game ad spend is expected to reach $9.21 billion in 2026… this represents only 2.3% of total digital ad spending.”

Still behind? Catch up with June’s Month In Digital

Can you believe it’s July already!?

Creators took over the Hollywood box office in June. I much prefer this to endless superhero slop.

Let’s dive into it,

Ryan

P.S. I wrote two pieces for People First: Why Do All These Influencers Keep Losing Elections? and 5 Digital Lessons From the 2026 Elections (So Far)

The Month in Digital | June 2026

Big Picture

• June was a “a pivotal moment for creators in Hollywood—the top two films at the global box office were directed by YouTube creators.” (Obsession is great, Backrooms is good.) Also, the finale to a YouTube series debuted in theaters: “The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act (the theatrical finale to one of the world’s most successful independent animated series) grossed an estimated $36.6M from more than 5,700 cinemas in the U.S., Europe, Australia/New Zealand and Mexico.”

• “Social media platforms used to be digital town squares, opening up interaction between brands and shoppers. Now, platforms function more as short-form entertainment hubs. The quiet shift is forcing brand marketers to rethink the role social plays in their marketing strategies, how creative gets made and success metrics. In some ways, brands are having to act like media companies, adapting by producing platform-native entertainment while still staying accountable to sales.”

• How much lamer will social media platforms be after countries ban all the cool kids from using them? “The feed-based platforms are built with teen girls in mind… a shortcut for evaluating whether a new platform actually matters … is largely about whether or not teens care about it.” Also, “Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows”

• “I don’t know if anyone but me noticed, but digital media died last month.”

• Behind the first TikTok micro-drama hit.

• “Small-business owners discover business products and services in many of the same places they consume personal media, making their path to purchase more fragmented than traditional B2B marketing models suggest.”

• I really enjoyed OnlyFantasy, an investigative podcast on the people and the business of OnlyFans.

• “In the EU, new rules under the Artificial Intelligence Act will begin applying in August, requiring AI-generated or manipulated content such as deepfake images, audio and video to be clearly labelled.” New York passed a similar law.

• “5 Cannes Lions takeaways as marketers wrestle with an industry in flux”

• Quick Tactical Links:

  • “The 11 Best Social Media Management Tools in 2026”

• Good Social Media: “We pointed a webcam at a wall — and activated more than 100,000 people” + Marketing the film Obsession.

• New Social App Watch: Bumble launching an IRL group date app, TikTok launching an event-focused app, and Meta launching a prediction market (gambling) app.

The State of Digital

• “Dentsu Predicts 75% of All Ad Spend Will Be Algorithm Driven By 2028”

• Pew: “About half of U.S. adults now report using AI chatbots, up substantially from the summer of 2024. This includes roughly one-in-four who use these tools on daily basis.”

• “About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account’s For You feed are AI slop… That’s roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube.”

• “Creator content now accounts for 44% of brands' paid media creative assets on average, with 92% of paid media leaders and marketing executives using creator content in paid media.”

• “11 social media trends every marketer should watch in 2026”

• “According to new reporting, automated bots and AI agents now generate more web traffic than human beings. Depending on the measurement, bots account for between 51% and 57% of all internet activity. For the first time, humans are no longer the majority users of the web”

• “44% of social marketers feel like their boss doesn’t understand social media”

Influencers/Creators

• “Brands are weakening the impact of influencer campaigns by being too controlling.”

• “M+R analyzed Magnitude Media’s dataset of the top 500 social media accounts covering politics and policy during the first quarter of 2026 and found just 17 advocacy groups* made the list, 3% of all accounts. Meanwhile, 270 creator accounts made up more than half the list of the top 500 most influential accounts.”

• I totally support this: “ Takano introduced the ‘Promoting Authenticity with Influencer Disclaimers’ or P.A.I.D. Act, which would update FEC requirements and force campaigns and creators to disclose their financial relationship by attaching some type of disclaimer to campaign-funded creator content.”

• Mr. Beast now has 500 million subscribers on YouTube.

• “The calendar year starts in January. The US government’s fiscal year starts in October. The school year in the Northern Hemisphere begins in August.

  I’m here to propose that influencer marketing’s year starts in April.”

• Hooks That Work: “To find out what actually makes people stop scrolling, we dug into performance data from every creator video ad over the last 6 months. We tagged each top performer by hook type, looked at what they had in common, and pulled the actual opening lines and moments that earned attention.”

• New Reports: Influencer Marketing Benchmarks + How To Pay Influencers

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI+

• Ghost Citations: “62% of AI citations don’t lead to brand mentions”

• “The problem is that the Trump administration’s AI policy is typically chaotic. It is not clear who has final authority to issue new rules for AI, and on what basis. It appears that the turn towards regulation is driven by serious people in the national security community raising serious concerns, and not some clownish attempt by political actors like Pete Hegseth to punish woke enemies. But how are such decisions being made, and how will they be made going forward?” An Example: “Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5”

• Survey Says: “60% of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff.” + Only “16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on society.”

• Half of Grok AI content is porn. Unrelated, I’m sure: “New research shows that despite xAI’s claim to have addressed misuse concerns, users are still able to generate deepfake nudes via Grok.”

• OpenAI revamping their in-app shopping experience.

• MIT Study: “Much like how GPS has weakened our navigation skills, AI can make us worse at detecting fake news.”

• “AI Grifters Are Making Anti-Data Center Slop With AI”

Meta

• “It seems that Meta is highly concerned about potential backlash to its use of facial ID in more applications. The company has removed its face ID functionality from the back-end code of its AI glasses after recent reporting on its inclusion.”

• Meta launched new AI glasses.

• It’s time to choose your WhatsApp username.

• Off-Site activity to change your algorithm: “We’re updating how we use information that other businesses already share with Meta. We already use this data — like games you play or purchases you make on other websites — to make the ads you see more relevant. In the future, we’ll use this information to personalize other parts of your experience, including the content you see in your Feed and AI responses.”

• Edits is coming to desktop.

• Mosseri details why two identical Reels can perform so differently.

• Expect more Series functionality to come to Facebook and Instagram Reels.

Instagram

• Meta’s AI chat support bots gave hackers access to large Instagram accounts.

• You now can have more control over your Instagram algorithm.

• A guide to getting more followers on Instagram and a big guide on Instagram performance.

• Using Instagram’s new grid reorder feature and adding unique captions to carousel posts.

• Meta brings Edits’ teleprompter tools directly to Instagram.

Threads

• Threads crosses the 500 million monthly active users mark.

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

• TikTok launches TikTok Symphony, a “creative AI” suite. Here’s a quick high-level overview. Also, they’re banning AI audio on shopping livestreams.

• Here’s a big 2026 TikTok performance study.

• Experts on cold starting your TikTok Shop.

• “A major culprit dumbing down literature is the rise of influencer culture—including influencers cosplaying as readers. BookTok is one of the largest communities on TikTok. Posters share which books they’re reading (or, more accurately, buying), and review their favorites, sometimes coordinating their books with a particular aesthetic. In 2025, there were over 35 million videos with the hashtag #BookTok, with a total of 370 billion views. In the United States alone, around $59 million of print sales could be linked to BookTok in 2024. Users tend to be young and spend an average of 1.5 hours a day on TikTok.” + “In 2023, the number of Americans aged 15 and older who read for more than 20 minutes a day was 15 percent.”

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV+

• 40 YouTube stats to know.

• YouTube, under appreciated as a social network, expanding in-app DMs.

• Optimizing your videos for YouTube search.

LinkedIn

• Always check your LinkedIn Other messages; you may get an offer to be on a World Cup team.

• LinkedIn is finally adding collab posts and what they’ve really been missing… animated GIF support.

• Huge guide on how to use LinkedIn effectively in 2026.

• New York Times: “Celebrities, athletes and other content creators are leaning into their LinkedIn presence, and the usual business executives and ‘thought leaders’ more associated with it are getting more personal.”

Reddit, Discord+

• “The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots.” A new study says: “A tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, Facebook, etc. can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently.”

• “We’ve spent the last few weeks hiding out in a Discord server that’s paying users to make clips and memes for Kalshi — and possibly other brands, as well. The offers going out to would-be clippers are for everything from World Cup tickets to David Protein bars. And very few of these posts seem to be disclosed as ads once they go live.”

Snapchat, BeReal, Divine+

Snap’s Specs are profoundly uncool and were the most made-fun-of product online I’ve seen in a while:

Audio: Podcasts, Streaming Music, Audiobooks+

• YouTube is a sleeper audiobook marketplace.

• Spotify now lets users clip and share moments from their favorite podcasts.

Newsletters & Blogs: Substack, Beehiiv, Medium+

• There are some new reply options to help moderate your Substack community and they’ve expanded post translation options.

Owned/Direct: Email, SMS, DMs, Signal, Etc..

• How to campaign in group chats.

Still behind? Catch up with May’s Month In Digital.

Pressing send on this as I head back out of town after a week visiting mom and family on the Eastern Shore. I got my crab feast in on Saturday night at The Red Roost, my favorite place in the world to eat blue crabs.

A lot happened in digital, from Google killing search to Slop invading even more online spaces.

Let’s get back to May.

Ryan

P.S. If you’re heading to Netroots Nation in Philly, catch Val and Gen-Z Ryan from People First at our free happy hour! RSVP here.

Subscribe now

The Month in Digital | May 2026

Big Picture

• Google Search as a useful tool is dead, now the focus is Slop results you can chat with. Bad news for anyone with a website.

• A quick global update on all the social media bans and regulations.

• “And the fact is, no meaningful federal regulation of AI currently exists. States have stepped up to fill the void, with 73 AI laws—ranging from protecting kids online to ensuring a human is in the loop when it comes to critical decisions like healthcare—enacted across 27 states in 2025. But states’ reach is increasingly limited, with Trump issuing an executive order in December directed against “excessive state regulation.” The tech industry, meanwhile, has worked to paralyze regulation at every turn, with AI companies pouring money into Super PACs to support tech-friendly candidates and block state regulatory laws.”

• “Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users.”

• “Listen, trend content can be great! I’ve advised on plenty of trend content for brands, and I ultimately do believe they have a place in your social strategy. But there are so many reasons why an over-reliance on trends can be a major misstep in brand social strategies.”

• “Ask one of the leading AI chatbots a question about the upcoming midterm elections, and there is a 90% chance the response will be flawed in some material way: a factual error, a clear partisan lean, a citation to a foreign state-controlled outlet, or some combination of all three.”

• “This is where it becomes illogical not to classify Gen Z screen use as substance addiction, because the reality is that it’s ruining our lives. 80% of Gen Z reported feeling lonely in the past year, compared to 45% of Baby Boomers. Nearly half of Gen Z have already received a formal mental health diagnosis, anxiety being the most common. The U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public health crisis, warning that chronic isolation carries health risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. As Jonathan Haidt has proven, the single greatest predictor of these symptoms is an addiction to your phone.”

• “The traditional divide between B2B and B2C marketing was always a little convenient. B2B was rational, slow, and relationship-driven. B2C was emotional, fast, and experience-led. Two audiences, two disciplines, and two entirely different species of buyer. Except that was never quite true, and now the evidence is impossible to ignore.”

• “Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???”

• “But the top-level discussion, especially among mainstream media outlets, is still largely stuck on misogynist livestream clips and marketing firms larping as fans of Netflix shows or whatever. But the entire internet — well, the four biggest apps we use to navigate the internet — has, quite suddenly, morphed into a horrible new version of television, seemingly programmed entirely by low-paid worker-users in the global south. Fake fans and fake shares abound, as every social media platform starts to devolve into some bleary combination of 9GAG and WorldstarHipHop.”

• Quick Tactical Links:

  • 5 tools to make clipping easier.

  • Social Media Marketing Guide 101

  • A guide to social media crossposting.

• Good Social Media:

  • “How does a local business with 400 followers on TikTok and 15K on Instagram end up starring in a New York Times Cooking YouTube video?”

  • “Inside the Artemis II social media strategy”

• New Social App Watch: Meta launches Forum, basically Reddit for Facebook Groups. Is Friendster coming back?

The State of Digital

• “Threads Is Bleeding Users, Whilst X Is Winning on Every Engagement Metric”

• “Anthropic raised $65 billion in new funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, the company said Thursday, making it the most valuable artificial intelligence startup in the world and surpassing rival OpenAI.”

• NEW REPORTS: 2026 State of Video + 2026 Social Benchmarks + Best Times To Post on Social Media + Meta’s Generation Zeitgeist + The Hidden Cost of Viewbotting

• Imperial College of London: “The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022.”

Influencers/Creators

• If you’re not boosting and repurposing your influencer content for programatic, you’re doing it wrong.
  “Brand spending on social video is accelerating rapidly. One contributing factor could be the practice of amplifying influencer video content on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Once an overlooked methodology that saw marketers use small budgets to top up reach on organic creator posts, amplification is now an essential element of influencer campaign planning.”

• The latest on how much influencers are getting paid for content and posting. Also, “the average rates that TikTok "micro" creators — those with follower counts between 5,000 and 50,000 — charged brands for partnership deals rose dramatically in the first quarter compared with the year-ago period.”

• “Despite growing conversations around long-term creator relationships, one-off collaborations still dominate across every major platform.”

• “The data shows that 45% of U.S. consumers now purchase at least one item per month based on a creator’s recommendation. For Gen Z, that behavior is even more pronounced, with 69% of the demographic reporting monthly purchases triggered by social discovery.”

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI+

• Gallup: “Seven in ten Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.”

• Understanding brand visibility in the age of AI.

• “The system prompt for OpenAI’s Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to ‘never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.’”

• “Downloads of the Grok app fell nearly 60% to around 8.3 million in April, declining from a peak of more than 20 million downloads in January.”

• “The Gartner survey found that execs who slashed staff to invest in AI have seen the same financial gains as those who held onto their employees. In othe words, attempting to replace workers with AI isn’t showing any detectable returns for these companies. And to make matters worse, many of these businesses specifically reduced their headcount to free up the cash needed for AI technology, meaning they sacrificed valuable institutional knowledge and employee goodwill for nothing.”

Meta

• Meta fired over 8,000 employees.

• A slew of new updates for the Edits app.

• Meta to launch in-app AI agents to do things like wish your friends a happy birthday and buy physical slop.

• Everything you need to know about Meta’s new paid subscription options. (More on that from TechCrunch.)

Instagram

• Be Original! “We are extending our originality guidelines to include photos and carousels to further discourage aggregators across Instagram. Now, accounts that primarily post unoriginal content in photos or carousel posts, in addition to reels, will no longer be shown in places where we recommend content.” Dos and Don’ts of original content direct from Instagram.

• “Instagram may be reassessing how its video strategy translates to CTV, with long-form programming emerging as a potential focus.”

• Via Mosseri: “The thing I think that matters most, and that you really should focus on, is not how much reach your post got. That is an important thing, obviously, but if you want to understand why a post got more or less reach, you should focus on your engagement rates.”

• You can now edit your Stories after posting.

• Building Instagram community in 2026.

• Instagram Is Testing: Captions for individual posts inside carousels and swapping texts off someone else’s Reels.

Threads

• Threads adds DMs to desktop and playable music in-stream.

Facebook

• “The whole concept of social media has shifted more towards entertainment than connection, which is a more fundamental shift. But that also means that while people are still logging onto Facebook, most are only checking out if their friends and family have shared any updates. Then they move onto other apps where they spend more time.”

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

• TikTok lets you edit the search keyword metadata on individual videos, which might aid in discovery. Plus, the latest advertising updates.

• A quick guide to scheduling TikTok posts.

• How paid and organic work together: “Organic content drives discovery, engagement, and cultural relevance, while boosted content scales visibility and converts already-interested audiences. The strongest… strategies combine both organic and amplifying performance.”

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV+

• YouTube continues to expand their legit valiant fight against deepfakes.

• 28 YouTube stats to know.

• YouTube pushing back against Slop Videos with better labeling: “Going forward, traditional YouTube videos will show an ‘AI’ label right below the video player, instead of being hidden in the video description. And for its vertical video TikTok knockoff Shorts — the format that’s proven most susceptible to being taken over by low effort slop, especially the kind that purports to be educational — an AI label will be displayed as an overlay at the bottom of the video.”

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn now officially prefers Human Slop content to AI Slop content. Not sure how anyone can tell the difference on there, outside of the AI Slop being moderately more coherent. Also, they’re now using AI to make your feed more “relevant.”

• “Meltwater analyzed 9.5 million AI citations across six major models, looking at B2B categories. It’s not surprising that LinkedIn is the #2 most-cited source for LLMs, second only to YouTube.”

• The latest LinkedIn marketing guide for businesses.

• LinkedIn is making it easier to sell consulting sessions directly from the platform.

Twitter/X

• Twitter limits free users to only 50 original tweets a day.

Partisan Networks: Bluesky & Truth Social+

• “Truth Social is dinky, averaging 700,000 global daily active users in April, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That’s 0.35% of X’s 200 million and 0.38% of the 185 million on Threads.”

• “Inside Donald Trump’s AI ‘slopaganda’ machine”

  “Trump has posted more than 2,700 times on Truth Social in 2026 — equivalent to more than 19 posts a day — with almost half of these containing images or videos, helping him dominate the attention economy outside of formal media appearances. At least 75 of those appear to have been generated using AI, according to an FT analysis of his feed, using a conservative methodology that is likely to undercount the true number. But 57 of those posts came in just the first three weeks of May, compared with eight for all of April.”

Pinterest

• “I went back to Pinterest and found it overrun with AI slop. It’s continued to get worse and worse, and it’s now basically unusable. Some images are labeled as generated or modified by AI, but many aren’t. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell what’s fake and what’s not.”

• “Pinterest posted solid results for Q1 2026, adding 12 million more users over last quarter, with 18% year-over-year revenue growth, as the company continued to solidify its place as a key product discovery platform.” They are also working to make their ads more relevant to users.

• 29 Pinterest stats to know.

Reddit, Discord+

• How to treat Reddit users like influencers via gifting and affiliate programs.

Snapchat, BeReal, Divine+

• Snapchat on how to harness “BFF energy at scale.”

Audio: Podcasts, Streaming Music, Audiobooks+

• Amazon launched audio Slop podcasts based on whatever Slop you’re buying off Amazon. Listen below for a thrilling podcast on fake dog poop.

• Video podcasts are largely banal slop.

Newsletters & Blogs: Substack, Beehiiv, Medium+

• Why your Shopify store needs a blog.

Owned/Direct: Email, SMS, DMs, Signal, Etc..

• What social impact organizations can learn from e-commerce email programs.

SEO / AI: GEO & AEO

• Google says the best AIGEO is just good SEO.

Undefined Digital Tabs

• “Mix and match traits like age and education to see how a person’s "DNA" determines if they lean Democrat or Republican.”

Still behind? Catch up with April’s Month In Digital.

Welcome to my look back at the big moments, key themes, and tactical updates in April for digital marketers and strategists who want to keep up.

If you enjoy, please share with a friend or colleague who would find it useful.

Thanks for reading,

Ryan

PS: This week on People First’s Influencer Impact, I sat down with Dr. to unpack her recent book, Don’t Talk About Politics: Changing 21st Century Minds, and what the science actually says about political persuasion. It’s a fun conversation! Listen here.

5/8/26 Video Update:

Subscribe now

The Month in Digital | April 2026

Big Picture

• Behold the AI Slop Loop:

  

  
  “It’s a pattern I’ve seen countless times in AI search responses, especially on topics related to SEO and AI search (GEO/AEO). And I have a working theory on how it spreads: one AI-generated article hallucinates a detail, sites running AI content pipelines scrape and regurgitate it, more AI-generated sites scrape the same misinformation, and suddenly a made-up algorithm update has citations. For a RAG-based system like Perplexity or AI Overviews, enough citations are basically all it needs to treat something as fact, regardless of whether it’s actually true.”

• “For all that’s been written about the coming AI crash, very little has been written about the short-form video collapse that is clearly just over the horizon. The companies and content farms flooding your feed with clips to make it seem like a particular podcaster or streamer is actually popular and the platforms themselves clearly inflating view counts to keep advertisers satisfied. And because many creators are doing this (thanks to short-form video, everything is content, and everyone who makes anything is a creator), we assume it’s true for everything that’s ‘popular.’ A death spiral for human creativity that, I would argue, is on par with AI. Though, of course, AI can make short-form videos now.”

• On Scientology verses the Speedrunners.

• Can a brand leave unhinged marketing behind? Plus, building a marketing strategy 101.

• It’s completely impossible for one person to successfully run a brand’s social media AND run quality influencer campaigns.

• “Social media has become a freak show.” - Nate Silver

• The pillars of good online community management hasn’t changed that much since April 18, 1983, when John Coate wrote Innkeeping in Cyberspace.

• “What if you could outsource your doomscrolling? That’s the premise behind the new startup Noscroll, which is offering an AI-powered bot that can browse your social feeds, news sites, and other online chatter, then text you when something important happens.” If you use Noscroll, you’ll miss out on that sweet “Zombie Flow.”

• “Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media: The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters.”
  
  400 pro-Trump AI creators is nothing. We’ll see this problem grow as we head into the November elections. These accounts all start from zero followers and are just playing the algorithm perfectly.

  
  Democrats could fight back with AI Slop of their own, or they could work with thousands of legitimate creators with real followers and actual nodes in their communities to play the same algorithm game. Real people can vote. AI bots can’t.

• 8 affordable social media management tools.

• New Social App Watch: An AI-powered social network run entirely on iMessage. (Same idea we’re bringing to influencer marketing with Val). Meta launching a new app called Instants that’s definitely not just a clone of Snapchat or BeReal. X launched X Chat, your Twitter DMs, but for some reason on a different app.

The State of Digital

• “The web is disappearing 🕳️

  
  According to a Pew Research Center report, 26% of pages from 2013-2023 are no longer accessible.”

• The new M+R Benchmarks Study is out!

• “Creator content… has become enshrined as a ‘core media channel’ for advertisers versus an add-on, the IAB said.”

• Edison Research’s latest US social media usage report. Pew says teens actually like social media.

• “People are up to 29% less willing to buy products designed by AI…, compared to those designed by humans.”

• “A major shift is underway in digital advertising: Meta Platforms is projected to generate more ad revenue than Google in 2026, signaling how marketers are increasingly favoring automated, performance-driven platforms.”

• AP + NORC Study: “The Evolving News Landscape: Comparing Media Habits and Trust Between Teens and Adults”

• “Clips are no longer the byproduct of the main product — they’re the main product. No matter the size of the show, they drive the ultimate reach.”

  

Influencers/Creators

• “Whether they’re putting on massive stadium shows, conducting meet-and-greets at branded pop-ups, or working a shift at a local shop, creators are increasingly using in-person events to engage with and own their audiences off of social media platforms.”

• “Brands running TikTok Influencer Marketing seeding campaigns in 2026 are achieving higher reach efficiency, measured as views per follower, by working with nano-tier creators…”

• Walmart’s creator social commerce playbook.

• Most people either don’t know, or don’t like, political influencers. 69% of people avoid political creators on social media.

• “One of the clearest patterns across high-performing campaigns is that the creators driving results rarely look like traditional influencers. They are smaller, more niche, and embedded in specific communities. Their audiences trust them not because of scale, but because of proximity. The irony is that the more influencer-like a creator feels, the less they tend to influence.”

• Creators: make sure you’re replying to your comments!

• “Offline communities—from dad groups to dance troupes—are poised to become the new influencers”

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI+

• “The researchers’ EEG findings were ominous: the students using ChatGPT ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,’ they found, and even got lazier with each consecutive essay.” Cal Newport is concerned.

• “In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with ‘reasoning-intensive’ cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.
  

  ‘We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,’ the study declares of its findings. ‘After just [about] 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.’”

• ICYMI: Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker feature on Sam Altman.

• Anthropic’s unreleased new model is scaring a lot of cybersecurity folks. Unrelated, Anthropic’s code leaked.

• The state of AI usage in marketing.

• “You can’t replace polls with AI: On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will only imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people.”

• Bad time to be a graphic designer: Claude Design & ChatGPT Images 2.

• CPC ads come to GPT.

• People are struggling because their bosses have “AI Brain.”

• OpenAI is buying podcasts. I’m sure their coverage of ChatGPT won’t change. ;)

• “Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.”

Meta

• “Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously.” Also, big layoffs coming in May.

• Be super careful if you’re using Meta’s ad ai creative tools, they might just hallucinate a new product.

• Detailed interview with the head of product at Edits. Apparently, 10% of all Reels are now produced with Edits.

• You can now block your own employees from seeing your ads.

• “Meta’s daily active user count dropped for the first time ever in Q1, with 3.56 billion using its apps in the period.”

Instagram

• “In his weekly Q&A session on Instagram Stories last week, Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri said that reposting feed posts in Stories won’t increase post reach, debunking a common myth about engagement boosting that’s been presented as a platform hack.”

• Instagram expanding Notes to reach more people.

• Clickable affiliate links are coming to Reels.

• What you need to know about Instagram Plus. (And WhatsApp Plus)

• More detailed Instagram video insights are now available.

• You can now edit your Instagram comments and schedule Trial Reels.

• New Hubspot Instagram Engagement report and Hootsuite’s Instagram demographics to know.

Threads

• Trending now (trending topics) is now live on Threads. Broadcast channels are coming.

• How Raisin Bran uses creative comments to drive Threads engagement.

Facebook

• Replying to comments on Facebook boosts engagement. I’d say replying to comments on any platform is basic best practice for any social channel.

• New Facebook monetization tips for creators.

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

• 5 things you didn’t know about TikTok.

• How to opt your videos out of the TikTok AI slop machine Remix.

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV+

• NetSlop: “Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations…” Meanwhile, China’s Netflix says the majority of their content will be made by AI within 5 years.

• You can now disable YouTube Shorts.

• YouTube is testing new sitewide AI search features and social-type posts on Shorts.

• Parents and advocates are lobbying against the flood of AI Slop for kids on YouTube.

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn to let users filter comments by verified accounts. It’s free and easy to get verified.

• Slew of new LinkedIn benchmarks from Socialinsider & metricool (their highlights).
  
  Highlight for me: post more pdf documents!

• Slow down and really savor those LinkedIn videos with the new playback speed feature. You can watch the first LinkedIn scripted satire series at double speed.

Twitter/X

• NiemanLab: “Links in tweets are bad for engagement. Over the last few days, sparked by a post from Nate Silver, people have started arguing again about the relationships between links and engagement. But our new analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers makes it pretty clear: Links do seem to hurt news publishers on X/Twitter.”

• X voice messages are back but Communities are dead.

Partisan Networks: Bluesky & Truth Social+

• Bluesky is Dying: “The network is shrinking, not growing. It's shrinking a lot: only about 1.1m people a day even like a post. This time last year it was 1.6m”

Pinterest

• Advertise to your Pinterest audiences over CTV. Paid on Pinterest is a “sales and ROI engine.”

Reddit, Discord+

• “Brands could miss critical conversations happening in real-time on Reddit, where over 180 million US users discuss products, share recommendations, and influence purchases before companies even know what's trending.”

• Reddit expanding access to media/publisher tools.

Snapchat, BeReal, Divine+

• Snapchat had a busy April, despite cutting 16% of its workforce because of AI. They want to see more advertisers using Snapcodes in real-life marketing efforts. Their Topic Chats are really taking off, with over 40,000 active in a recent single chat. Plus, they’re launching Sponsored AI chatbots, where the world’s lonely teens can chat with an advertisement instead of a friend.
  

  Also, a guide to Snapchat marketing and a survey says that Snapchatters travel a lot.

• Via Jack Dorsey: “A new project to bring back Vine’s six-second looping videos is now available for download on the App Store and Google Play. Divine, as this Vine reboot is called, offers access to an archive of roughly 500,000 Vine videos, restored from a backup of the original service, and allows creators to post new Vines once again.”

Audio: Podcasts, Streaming Music, Audiobooks+

• “The podcast train keeps rolling.” Highlights from the latest Edison Research report on listenership. 80% of Americans over 12 listened to at least one podcast in the last year! (You should listen to my travel podcast.)

• “Deezer announced… AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new music uploaded to its platform… it’s receiving almost 75,000 AI-generated tracks per day and more than two million per month. The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams…”

Newsletters & Blogs: Substack, Beehiiv, Medium+

• Substack Goes Global: “Today, we’re cracking open the world of ideas even further as we introduce new translation features, starting with the ability to translate Notes written in English into 15 languages, or into English from over 100 languages.”

• Substack dropped some new tools to help manage your publication.

SEO / AI: GEO & AEO

• Hubspot with the GEO explainer you need: “Generative engine optimization (GEO) is no longer a forward-looking experiment. It’s already influencing how customers and prospects are discovering brands. AI tools have become a core part of how people research. Buyers are using large language models (LLMs) to shortlist vendors, compare options, understand technical concepts, and validate decisions before ever visiting a website.”

• “More than One-Third of Google Searches Include an AI Overview” Shocker: they aren’t that accurate.

Undefined Digital Tabs

• Comparing Gen Alpha and Gen Z.

Still behind? Catch up with March’s Month In Digital.

Finishing this up this morning at Azhar, one of my favorite coffee shops in the city. Don’t miss it if you’re ever in town.

Lots happened in March, from historic lawsuits to GenAI app shutdowns to multiple important platform updates.

As always, our goal here is to make sure marketers have the info they need to be effective, and maybe add a little more that expands the aperture of how you think about digital.

Now, let’s go back to March.

Ryan

Subscribe now

The Month in Digital | March 2026

Big Picture

• Around the world, social media companies are facing a new level of legal and regulatory scrutiny. In fact, what’s happening goes beyond scrutiny, it’s directionally consequential.
  

  In March, the US delivered two major verdicts against social media companies. In 2026, we’ve also seen Australia’s full under-16 ban, along with additional bans and restrictions pending across Europe, the UK, and Asia. The backlash is accelerating.
  

  There is a lot to applaud here. I don’t think there’s much doubt that social media is contributing to rising levels of depression, anxiety, and worse, and to societies that are increasingly polarized by algorithms and cauterized by social media brain rot.
  

  But there are also legitimate and serious concerns in the United States about the repercussions of these rulings for basic freedom of speech online:

  “If you care about free speech online, about small platforms, about privacy, about the ability for anyone other than a handful of tech giants to operate a website where users can post things, these two verdicts should scare the hell out of you… Because the legal theories that were used to nail Meta this week don’t stay neatly confined to companies you don’t like. They will be weaponized against everyone.”

  What this means for marketers, we’ll have to see. But one thing is clear: we’ve entered a new era. Digital companies have lost their legal and governmental luster, and AI is just getting warmed up…

• Valuable for all your social video creation: “Based on analysis of 10,110 Facebook Reels published by 704 brand Pages, Emplifi found several key data points that can help to boost engagement, including the use of voice and the inclusion of human faces.”

• A guide to how stickers, polls, etc. can help drive “micro-interactions” on your content.

• “Disney’s experiment with vertical video begins this week. Verts, a vertical video offering, will begin to appear on Disney+ this week in the U.S.”
  
  Totally unrelated: “Conan O’Brien Introduces Ventura Crossroads” for turning classic movies into vertical short-form slop.

• One of those weird legacy beliefs that I still hear everywhere is that B2B buyers are precious creatures who only engage in the sacred act of B2B buying during their very holy in-office internet time. This is nonsense and has been for a decade. B2B buyers are even using Snapchat these days!

• Ugly Ads > Produced Studio Ads

• I’ve been telling clients for 15 years that most of their followers don’t see most of their content. It’s more true than ever, and that’s why you should be reusing your best social content.

• Clipping For The Win: “Clavicular is a case study in the business of clipping. You can see here that Clavicular got 1,000,706,585 views (!) in the last month from 34,667 videos and 645 clippers.”

• The Democratic Party is recreating MSNBC: old, white, educated, well-off, on the internet, and calling it creator marketing.

• “No candidate’s communications landscape is a curated garden of official messaging anymore. It is a wild, AI-accelerated ecosystem where a single deepfake, a viral TikTok remix or a generative search summary can define a candidate’s reputation before they even have a chance to log on. For candidates, the message is clear: break through the noise by adapting to these new tools, or be defined by others – and likely lost to history.”

• Social Slop Eats TV Slop: “The annual number of unscripted and reality series with season premieres in the United States has plummeted by a third since 2022, according to Luminate, a research group. It fell 15 percent just last year, to 794.” Still 794 more than we need, but at least it’s progress.

• A dude is going to live a year unplugged and take all sorts of measurements to see how it affects his body and mind. Luckily, he’ll be providing near real-time updates online.

• 7 Strategies for Marketing in a Recession: Small Business Tips

• New Social App Watch: Slowly is an app that sends your digital messages very S-L-O-W-L-Y, sort of like having a real old-school pen pal.

The State of Digital

• “YouTube becomes the largest global media platform, drawing more ad dollars than legacy giants combined.”

• The best times to post on social media in 2026 across all major networks and the state of social media engagement.

• A huge new 2026 Social Media Benchmark Report, from the team that used to be Rival IQ.

• “Gartner Marketing Survey Finds 50% of Consumers Prefer Brands That Avoid Using GenAI in Consumer-Facing Content”

• “Platform-agnostic user-generated content (UGC) accounts for 35% of influencer marketing campaigns worldwide, surpassing TikTok (21%) and trailing only Instagram (40%).” This is why we launched the People First Creator Studio: to connect organizations and agencies with high-quality (non-slop) UGC.

• “A new Harris Poll finds that, as far as young consumers are concerned, TikTok is in the early stages of a brand crisis. The research finds that 60% of Gen Z trust the platform less than they used to, 74% are more cautious about what they engage with, and 25% wish it had never existed. The most alarming signal may well be from creators: Nearly half of Gen Z creators — 49% — are posting less, have stopped altogether, or have shifted platforms. There’s trouble ahead for other social media platforms, too. While X/Twitter is the most loathed by Gen Z audiences, with 45% having negative perceptions, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram are all unloved. The clear winner: YouTube, with a 78% favorability score and 66% of people using it daily. Substack, already used daily by 11% of Gen Z, is also gaining.”

Influencers/Creators

• The most in-touch marketers understand that attention economy winners figure out how to distribute their messages from all directions, and the best way to do that is with lots of UGC and microinfluencers:
  
  - ”The machinery has a name: user-generated content marketing, or micro-creator marketing. The 2026 version has outgrown its guerrilla origins. Agencies now run what amounts to content manufacturing: 600, 800, 1,200 videos per month, optimized weekly the same way a performance marketer optimizes a paid ads campaign. The logic has flipped. Instead of betting on one creator with the right audience, the playbook is to flood every feed with content that looks organic. Volume is the strategy.”
  
  - “Instead of sending elite influencers on another lavish trip, Urban Outfitters is bringing 100 community members on vacation. Having a humble social following is non-negotiable. As part of its ‘Add a Story’ campaign, the brand is bringing creators with fewer than 10,000 followers on a brand trip to Joshua Tree, featuring giveaways and surprise performances.”

• How much influencer marketers are making around the world.

• 5 things to avoid when running an influencer campaign.

• Employee Generated Content is foundational these days. Here’s how some of the best brands are doing it.

• Why People First is building the only actual Democratic infracture for the creator economy.

• “Marketers are looking to diversify their influencer marketing budgets to include people whose audiences are smaller, but more likely to pay attention to what they say in spaces removed from the cacophony of social media feeds.”

• 30k+ creators are reading the People First creator newsletter. Are you?

Influencer Impact: Creator Edition by People First

From Creator Paydays to Unexpected Messengers: The New Rules of Influence

Howdy y’all…

Read more

5 months ago · 35 likes · Val Cheney

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc…

• “In reviewing 11 leading AI models and human responses to interactions with those models across various scenarios, a team of Stanford researchers concluded…that AI sycophancy is prevalent, harmful, and reinforces trust in the very models that mislead their users.”

• “Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging in its complaint that the AI giant has committed ‘massive copyright infringement.’”

• “AI;DR is new internet speak for AI-generated slop posts have just dropped. It is a riff on the initialism TL;DR (‘too long; didn’t read’), which is often wielded as a criticism of a piece of writing simply too long or confusing to be worth the time it takes to read.”

• Microslop (the word, they love the slop) was banned by Microsoft on their Discord server. So please show some respect and don’t use or say Microslop when describing slop created by Microsoft products.

• Claude had a very good month. Here’s a guide for marketers debating on leaving ChatGPT for Claude.

• How AI is changing the modern buyer journey based on 1,000 interviews.

• Too much AI at work is giving high performers “AI Brain Fry.”

• “We may be well on the way to a dystopian vision of content marketing where artificial intelligence (AI) tools create content designed for other AI tools as the primary audience, according to a review of a couple of separate reports on content marketing in the age of AI.”

• Sora, a slop video app for users who have neither artistic talent nor creative ideas worth pursuing, shut down. We’ll have to remember it for its Casablanca-level iconic creations like Pixar Epstein Island.

• A study with good news on AI job losses and a study with bad news on AI job losses. Go ahead and read the one you want to confirm your biases.

Meta

• In many ways, Facebook feels like a graveyard. But what if it could actually become one!
  
  Meta “was granted a patent in late December that outlines how a large language model can ‘simulate’ a person’s social media activity, such as responding to content posted by real people. ‘The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased.’”

  Your racist uncle can keep posting racist memes from the grave.

• Meta “is planning to conduct yet another round of sweeping layoffs that could affect an astonishing 20 percent or more of the company — one of the clearest signs yet that Meta is prioritizing big bets on AI over employing humans who Zuckerberg believes will soon be made redundant by the tech anyway.”

• Meta making it easier to drive in-app purchases for advertisers.

• Forget vibe coding, what about vibe company acquisition? Meta bought the fake agent social network Moltbook.

• PHEW: After receiving complaints from at least three users, Meta decided not to shut down Horizon Worlds on VR.

Instagram

• Smart: Using Close Friends to reward your most active followers.

• Instagram Trial Reels are a great testing and optimization tool.

• You can finally rearrange your Carousel posts after publishing! Also, 7 ideas to get your Carousel strategy going.

• Clickable caption links might finally be coming for verified Instagram accounts.

• Turn your still photos into an AI Slop video!

Facebook

• It can really pay to post about politics on Facebook these days.

• Facebook is looking to bring back creators with their new “fast track” paid program and by rewarding original content.

WhatsApp

• WhatsApp is rolling out more paid options globally.

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

• TikTok’s new local feed, plus SMB-focused paid media, is making TikTok a great place for local businesses to be.

• The latest in TikTok’s paid advertising solutions.

• TikTok says no to end-to-end direct message encryption.

• Older TikTok users are also finding out about new products from influencers.

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV

• Broadcast TV is dying, but nichecasting on YouTube is thriving: “Online creators are launching talk shows about the narrowest of topics, from trucking logistics to advertising to, well, the business of Hollywood. In the livestream landscape, could smaller be better?”

• The best times to post on YouTube.

• YouTube is giving access to deepfake detection tools to more politicians and journalists.

• YouTube’s new tool will allow others to AI-slopify your YouTube Shorts.

• YouTube’s new creator API will better connect YouTube creators to the broader creator economy.

LinkedIn

• Kagi launched a "translation" tool to turn normal speech into LinkedIn speak.
  
  Here’s how it would translate that sentence:
  
  “🚀 EXCITING NEWS! Kagi just dropped a game-changing "translation" tool designed to disrupt traditional communication and pivot normal speech into high-impact LinkedIn thought leadership. 📈”

• Strong ROAS numbers from LinkedIn B2B paid media.

• LinkedIn is updating its algorithm to show you the kind of jargon slop that’s made for you.

• LinkedIn will no longer allow you to go live instantly; you have to plan it at least a few minutes in advance.

Twitter/X/xAI/Grok

• The best times to post on Twitter based on millions of tweets.

• X killed night mode. I guess it’s always a dark, depressing time on there anyway.

• X experimenting with topic filters.

• Elon fired a bunch of people from xAI because he “didn’t build it right the first time around.”

• Democrats abandoned X to go to platforms like Bluesky that no remotely normal person will ever care about and are paying the price of invisibility: “American political life still runs, for better or worse, on the currencies of visibility, attention, and partisan outrage, and X remains a place where those currencies hold their value. Democrats and progressive groups can turn away from the platform, but the conversation will go on without them.”

Bluesky, Truth Social, Etc…

• 😂 Bluesky found investors clueless enough about social media to raise a $100M!!! Series B.

Pinterest

• Pinterest is making it easier to paid promote a pin.

Reddit & Discord

• How Dove turned real-life Reddit product feedback into a clever campaign.

• An agent to help warm-up your brand’s Reddit accounts.

Gaming/Twitch

• The Salvation Army launched a thrift store in Roblox.

Substack, beehiiv, Newsletters, & Blogs

• Substack is finally updating its video options so you can record without having to be live.

Direct/Groups: Email, SMS, DMs, Signal, Etc..

• Gmail’s Primary tab doesn’t really matter that much for email deliverability if you’re doing it right.

• The top reasons consumers opt-in to your brand’s email list.

• Lots of counterintuitive findings in M&R’s AI analysis of 3.8 billion social impact emails.

SEO / AI-GEO

• YouTube remains the second biggest search engine on the internet, and here’s how you should be thinking about that strategically.

• “When AI systems evaluate products, vendors, or solutions, they’re pulling together signals from across the open web. In practice, those signals tend to fall into five buckets.”

More Digital Tabs

• Apple is rolling out new tools for small businesses, including ads in Apple Maps.

• Heroes are using drones to map private community streets that are off-limits to Google Maps.

• The rise and fall of Clubhouse.

• “Yahoo News is consistently one of the most popular news sites in the country.”

took home another Reed Award in March, this time for Best Influencer Partnership for a campaign we ran with the Gill Foundation in support of trans youth. My partners and were on hand in Charleston, SC, to accept it.

Thanks to all our partners for trusting and supporting us, and to the team for continuing to innovate in the progressive, social-impact creator work we’ve been building since 2019. Learn more about our work: https://peoplefirst.cc/

Still behind? Catch up with February’s Month In Digital.

Finishing this up at Caffa, a cute café if you’re ever near Parque 93.

Another month of digital media, another month of me wondering whether I like social media more or less than the McDonald’s CEO likes McDonald’s products.

Before we dive in, two quick moments of self-promotion:

People First launched our Creator Studio: access to our top UGC creators who can turn around content for your brand or organization in 72 hours, with full paid and organic rights included. High-quality UGC, not slop.

We also launched a new version of Val last week. It’s built for marketing teams and solo practitioners who want end-to-end influencer marketing without the heavy lift on staff or budget.

Try it now. Send Val an SMS at +1 (773) 915-0935 or visit http://www.meetval.ai

Now, let’s go back to February.

Ryan

The Month in Digital | February 2026

Big Picture

• “Ogilvy Social.Lab presented its 2026 Social Trends Report. If I had to sum up the insights in one sentence, I'd say this: social media is deeply, profoundly tired.” These 4 tips from Ogilvy might make your social less exhausting.

• Here’s a sharp, timely piece exploring what users are seeking from social media this year. The themes unpacked in the link:

  • Improvisation

  • Analog

  • Romance

  • Camp

  • Lore

• The niche networks that have more political power than you think during Election 2026.
  

  This is the first in a series about different channels during Election 2026 from Katie Harbath. I’m linking to many of them in this issue under their appropriate sections. Katie was very transparent about how she used AI to assemble these pieces, which I don’t think takes away from their value. It has inspired me to address how I use AI for The Month in Digital (hint: not very much at all outside of light copy editing) in a future issue.

• “Your next favorite show to binge may be just 60 seconds long
  Microdramas are bite-size, scripted, made-for-mobile shows, and they’re gaining popularity in the U.S.” Count me out, thanks.

• “Alessandro Galeazzi, from the University of Padova in Italy, researches social media behaviour and echo chambers. He says that verifying whether or not a video is AI takes mental effort, and over the long run, he fears people will simply stop checking. ‘My feeling is that the flood of nonsense, low-quality content generated using AI might further reduce people’s attention span.’
  

  He distinguishes content that is intended to deceive with the more comical and obviously-fake AI slop, like fish with shoes, or gorillas lifting weights at the gym.

  But even that more whimsical content might also have a damaging impact. He talks of the risk of ‘brain rot’ - the idea that our constant exposure to social media is harming our intellectual abilities.
  

  ‘I would say AI slop increases the brain rot effect, making people quickly consume content that they know is not only unlikely to be real, but probably not meaningful or interesting.’”

• “In a world where even major multinational corporations are moving away from overproduced, professional-looking content in their branding, looking instead towards individual influencers and user-generated content, the Democrats seem unable to move beyond a media strategy from over a decade ago. Creating endless media channels, all of which repeat slick phrases in a desperate hope to catch on—and shouting very loudly at opponents who aren’t even watching—just reinforces how sad and out of touch they seem.”

• Two Good Marketing Stories: “How marketers convinced America to eat fish sticks” and “Museum curator, 77, learns Gen Z slang and goes viral: ‘Honestly, she ate’”

• “The future of social media won’t be a breakthrough app or a surprising new feature. Social media will develop around how, where, and why people connect, shaped by fragmentation and AI acting as an intermediary. In this post, we will dive deeper into why the current social media model is eroding and what the future of social might look like to help you address your strategy for 2026.”

• New Social App Watch: Instagram might launch a Snapchat clone called Instants. Meta is testing a Vibes app for 100% AI slop content. Gizmo is an app for vibe-coded mini apps. Lots of winners there, surely.

The State of Digital

• Organic Search Keeps Declining: “The median drop in unique users coming from organic search was nearly 40% in December 2025 compared to December 2024 — a bigger drop than our March–August analysis, where the YOY reductions ranged from single-digits to low double-digits.”

• Creator Ads FTW: “Creator ads rank highest among ad types buyers are most focused on increasing investment in for 2026, per the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2026 Outlook Study. 57% percent of buyers say influencer ads and partnerships are their top priority this year—up from 48% in 2025. According to IAB, this increased emphasis on creators reflects brands’ push for more human storytelling in an AI-first era.”

• 2026 Social Media Benchmarks

Influencers

• Specfluencing: Creators are making free, fake sponsored content in the hopes of eventually getting paid.

• People First released our free 2026 Election Guide on best practices for political campaigns and advocacy organizations to engage influencers this cycle.

• “77% of marketers are actively repurposing creator content in paid ads, a figure that reflects a broader repositioning of creator-produced video from an organic social tactic to a deployable media asset.”

• Meta is selling merch Slop overtop of creators actual product recommendations:
  
  “Creators have raised concerns about Instagram’s latest artificial intelligence-powered shopping test, in which users are being prompted to buy items displayed within Instagram posts, with Meta’s system finding similar product matches to facilitate shopping in-stream. The more recent addition of AI tagging has enhanced this, adding similar product matches that can be displayed when a user taps the “Shop the Look” button on a post.
  

  But some influencers have been less than pleased by this new option, which will display matches for products that they don’t endorse. The tagging could also compete with their own brand deals and arrangements… some creators have expressed frustration at this new process, which the influencers claim could erode the trust that they’ve built with their audiences.”

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc…

Over the past few days, the Trump regime attempted to push Anthropic to cross various red lines with its DOD military program. Anthropic refused, and Trump’s henchmen then attempted to damage the company’s commercial viability.

Seeing green and red, money and blood, Sam Altman got on his knees and tweeted that OpenAI would do whatever Trump’s goons wanted, even if his technology were used against his family, neighbors, and fellow Americans.

OpenAI was already losing market share, and the immediate movement to quit OpenAI, I quit and switched to Claude on Saturday, won’t help matters. But we can at least feel good that not all AI companies are willing to hand over Americans’ freedom, privacy, and security for a massive military contract.

Unfortunately, even one is enough to put us all in danger.

• Harvard Business Review on how Gen AI intensifies work:
  

  “From April to December last year, we studied how generative AI tools changed work habits at the tech company. We did this through in-person observation two days a week, tracking internal communication channels, and more than 40 in-depth interviews across engineering, product, design, research, and operations.

  We identified three main forms of intensification.”

• Anthropic on Coding With AI: “We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.”

• OpenAI’s ads start at $200K and are currently in market being tested. Here’s what these “aggressive” ads actually look like.

• GenAI Election 2026 Guides: OpenAI and Anthropic.

• Import your ChatGPT memory into Claude.

• Moltbook OpenClaw is a maybe-sorta-fake social network for AI agents. It’s like putting a Teddy Ruxpin in front of your Alexa and calling their interaction spiritual.

Meta

Meta plans to release smart glasses that can identify the faces of people you see on the street and potentially provide more information about them, including access to their social accounts. The company believes it can finally do this now, given how the U.S. has descended into a corrupt autocracy.

From The New York Times:

“‘We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,’ according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.”

I think we’ve finally figured out a way to get libertarians to wear face masks!

• Meta’s statement on their 2026 Election plans.

• “Ads that feature a testimonial drive 7.5% higher offsite conversion rate and 9.6% higher off-site click-through rate compared to business as usual campaigns, on average.”

Instagram

• “Instagram boss says 16 hours of daily use is 'problematic’ not addiction”

• How to get that somewhat cringe blue verified checkmark on Instagram.

• Instagram is leaning into the mini-drama and short-series trend. Maybe that’s why they are testing making Reels even more prominent in the app.

• The latest best image sizes for Instagram.

• 5 current Instagram trends that social media managers need to know. Plus, how to post Instagram Carousels that work.

• Tracking a decade of IG shifts: “Finding ways to tackle widespread AI content is the latest in a long series of shifts Instagram has undergone over the past decade. Some are obvious and others are more subtle. But all affect user experience and behaviour, and, more broadly, how we see and understand the online social world.
  

  To identify some of these patterns, I examined ten years’ worth of Instagram posts from a single account (@australianassociatedpress)… This involved looking at nearly 2,000 posts and more than 5,000 media assets. I selected the AAP account as an example of a noteworthy Australian account with public service value.
  

  I found six key shifts over this timeframe. Although user practices vary, this analysis provides a glimpse into some larger ways the AAP account – and social media more broadly – has been changing in the past decade.”

Threads

• The best way to boost your Threads engagement is to respond to comments.

• Dear Algo: Now you can tell the Threads algorithm all the cool stuff you’re into that makes you very unique and special.

• You can now share your Threads post as an Instagram Story so people you know might actually see it. Finally, a way to make Instagram Stories (more) terrible.

Facebook

• After killing off the Messenger desktop app last year, Facebook is now shutting down Messenger’s standalone website.
  

  I only use Messenger these days for a single, longstanding group chat with my best friends from high school. Looks like we’ll be switching to something else soon.

• Tasteless and have lots of time on your hands? Turn your Facebook profile photo into an AI slop animation! Wow, super neat and creative!!!

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.

TikTok’s U.S. traffic has largely recovered following the transition to the new entity. It looks like they really weren’t censoring anyone; the new team just had no idea how to make TikTok work. Another point for incompetence over evil.

• TikTok is getting more local, with a new local feed. This is valuable for local candidates and SMBs. If you’re an SMB, TikTok just released a guide for you.

• TikTok and the 2026 Election.

• The best times to post on TikTok in 2026.

• TikTok’s more expensive ads convert better, so they can be more cost-effective.

• If you think of TikTok as two types of communities, Stay and Play, Democrats love Stay. It’s safe there; nobody says mean things or anything that challenges their worldview. Play is where Republicans live. This is where the actual fight for culture is happening, while Democrats are recreating MSNBC and Air America within highly restricted, overlapping communities. Sigh.

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV

• Some good new data on YouTube engagement rates by video length:

  • Videos under 30 seconds receive a 1% organic engagement rate.

  • Content between 1 and 3 minutes leads by a wide margin, with a 2.5% engagement rate.

  • Videos 3 to 5 minutes perform the worst at just 0.8%.

  • Engagement rate picks back up as length increases, reaching about 1.7% for videos 10 minutes long or more.

• Creators are going all in on YouTube Shorts.

• YouTube and Streaming during the 2026 Election.

LinkedIn

• 7 things to know about LinkedIn in 2026.

• This time, LinkedIn is really going after engagement pods.

• 6 B2B marketing insights from LinkedIn. (TLDR: Work with creators!)

• How to treat LinkedIn as an ecosystem:

  

Twitter/X/xAI/Grok

• X and Bluesky for the 2026 Election.

• Twitter induces partisan brainrot: “At The Argument, we ask respondents which platforms they regularly get news from every month, and our results revealed striking differences in opinion among the audiences of different news platforms. As an example, even though ICE’s net favorability rating is at -26 percentage points with all voters, it’s almost break-even with people who get their news from Twitter. Compare that to other social media platforms like Reddit and TikTok, where over 70% of voters viewed the agency unfavorably.”
  
  I’m on Twitter every day, and I have extremely negative views of ICE. You can and should block Nazis.

• Those weird, empty vanilla comments on your tweets are probably from actual NPCs (bots), and Twitter might one day do something about all the slop.

Bluesky, Truth Social, Etc…

• Bluesky is getting really advanced! You can even schedule posts now!

Pinterest

• 7 things to know about Pinterest in 2026.

• AI Slop Watch: “Users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. ‘I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it… I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete.’”

Reddit & Discord

• Reddit 2026 Creative Trends

• “Reddit has quietly become one of the most significant search destinations on the web, with roughly 80 million unique visitors now using its internal search function each month.” I’m sure the new “AI-Powered Shopping Search” feature won’t be total garbage.

• How to be a corporate propagandist on Reddit and not “get roasted.”

Snapchat, BeReal, DiVine, Etc

• 5 things to know about Snapchat in 2026.

• Snapchat finally adds paid creator subscriptions.

Podcasts & Audio

• A clever breakdown of how and when listeners skip podcast ads.

Substack, beehiiv, Newsletters, & Blogs

• Substack is making it easier to make your blog look less terrible.

• Substack and the 2026 Elections.

• LOL at Substack and Polymarket’s partnership: “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” < Seriously, someone was paid to write that cringe.

Gaming/Twitch

• Gaming and the 2026 Election.

SEO / AI-GEO

• Users are likely to search other sources after reading about your brand on AI. This is called a Second Search.
  42% “search for that brand separately to learn more.”

  Only 17% “click through to that brand’s website immediately.”

• “ChatGPT handles 12% of Google's search volume but sends 190 times less traffic to websites with a 96% lower click-through rate than Google's search engine.” But maybe, the few who do click from AI are more likely to actually convert.

Still behind? Catch up with January’s Month In Digital.

Download the People First 2026 Influencer Election Guide here.

Welcome to all the new subscribers from our shout-out in Marketing Brew. We talk digital here at least once a month.

I’m writing this from freezing Ocean City, MD. Spring can’t come soon enough.

Let’s dive into what happened in digital in January.

Ryan

Update: The Ryans Talk January:

The Month in Digital | January 2026

Big Picture

• “AI slop has won. And when it comes to helping Instagram's 3 billion users understand what is real, that should largely be someone else's problem, not Meta's. Camera makers — presumably phone makers and actual camera manufacturers — should come up with their own system that sure sounds a lot like watermarking to ‘to verify authenticity at capture.’ Mosseri offers few details about how this would work or be implemented at the scale required to make it feasible.”

• “Hollywood… is no longer organised around cinema, careers, or culture. It is being reorganised as a content farm for Silicon Valley: an IP supply chain feeding platforms whose real business is subscriptions, data, and scale. Big screens get in the way. Events create memory. Memory creates independence. None of that serves a retention model.”

• An enterprise guide to customer social media engagement.

• “2026 will mark the beginning of the end for manual programmatic buying as genAI gives way to agentic AI and automation becomes the industry standard. Marketers must prepare now for AI to take on a larger role in the programmatic process; those that don’t may get left behind.”

• “In recent months, brands like Dollar Shave Club, Almond Breeze, and Equinox have all used AI-generated content while also making fun of AI ‘slop’ in creative campaigns. Almond Breeze and Equinox specifically took aim at the often outrageous results of AI image generation, showing everything from boy bands in space to Justin Trudeau pole dancing as a way to contrast with their products’ real ingredients and results.

  While ‘slop’ ads may seem like the latest iteration of anti-AI advertising, marketers behind the campaigns told us they’re not actually against the technology. Instead, the ads seem to tap into growing consumer sentiment about the technology, while still taking advantage of the benefits that AI tools can sometimes deliver.”

• “I know a lot of social teams are in meetings this week, thinking about what their account should post, if anything at all. I’ve worked in this industry long enough to know that those decisions are often out of our hands. Still, there is a responsibility to the audience—the people that brands increasingly treat like ‘besties’ in a group chat—to find some humanity.”

• “iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment.”

• “MrBeast’s recruitment doesn’t rely on virality alone. His team is hiring a head of viral marketing to ‘convert cultural moments into sign-ups, activation, revenue, retention, and repeat engagement.’ The job also comes with the expectation for repeat success, recruiting candidates who can ‘build engines, not campaigns.’ This reframes virality as routine business, rather than a stroke of good luck.”

• Welcome to the paid social media subscription era.

• “Just as I’ll never wrap my head around the idea of watching a live streamer play video games, I’ll never truly get why millions of people pay out $80 a month to watch low-budget microdramas with plots so simplistic they could be written by AI. Who are these people?” TikTok launched an app called Pinedrama dedicated to microdramas.

• New Social App Watch: Tangle, Digg returns, & UpScrolled.

The State of Digital

• “One of the most anticipated changing of the guard moments set to happen in 2026, based on each app’s current trajectory, is that Meta’s Twitter clone Threads is likely to overtake the app formerly known as Twitter, X, in terms of active users.”

• “Can you tell real video from AI? We showed 1,000 people two videos from the same frame - one real, one generated. Less than 10% could tell the difference.”

• “In the State of Video 2026 report from Animoto, a cloud-based video creation service, close to 83% of survey respondents say they’ve watched a video they suspect was AI-generated — pointing to robotic gestures (67% of survey respondents), unnatural voices (55%), and a lack of emotional tone (51%). And Animoto’s report shows that’s getting turned into a business consequence: 36% of consumers say AI-generated brand videos lower their perception of the brand. That’s a lot of downside for a so-called workflow upgrade.”

• “How Often to Post on Social Media in 2026: A Data-Backed Guide”

• Via Blue State: “Results from 2025 year-end fundraising and takeaways for 2026”

• “Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties. Participants were asked how much time on a normal weekday in term time they spent on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media, or gaming. They were also asked questions about their feelings, mood and wider mental health. The study found no evidence for boys or girls that heavier social media use or more frequent gaming increased teenagers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression over the following year.” (Here’s pushback on this study.)

Influencers

• What is a creator in 2026?

• Spot-on analysis of how a non-political influencer, best known for videos like “riding a bike over a ramp lit on fire,” took on the Minnesota fraud scandal. His videos reached tens of millions of views and generated enough outrage that Gov. Walz ultimately stepped aside from the race. While the scandal had long been covered by traditional media, this creator succeeded in galvanizing right-wing media and audiences in a way legacy outlets never did.

• Comparing each social network’s content/IP terms of service.

• “Google Ads introduced Creator Search in beta, letting advertisers find YouTube creators by keyword or channel handle. Filters for subscriber count, average views, location, and contact availability cut the time and manual effort needed for research and outreach.”

• “Influencers and OnlyFans models dominate US ‘extraordinary’ artist visas”

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc…

• “Coding is having its GarageBand moment, its Excel moment. A moment like in 2004, when Apple made music production widely available. Or like in 1985, when Microsoft banished the idea of a spreadsheet as paper that required an accountant to calculate every value by hand. Enter Claude Code, software created by the AI company Anthropic for ‘vibe coding’—writing code with natural language. It isn’t the first platform to try this, but it is the first to nail the anybody-can-do-this feeling.”

• “Churches across the United States are dealing with a new kind of grift. It’s one that targets those of faith: AI-generated Deepfakes of pastors asking their congregations for money. The technology has gotten so good that scammers don’t need to skim off the top of a collection plate. They just need a trusting, familiar face. The most common targets of this new scam are pastors with large online followings. Their fame and constant media presence make for dupes.”

• “Now, a damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular — and protected — works, with a stunning degree of accuracy.

  They found that Claude outputted “entire books near-verbatim” with an accuracy rate of 95.8%. Gemini reproduced the novel “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” with an accuracy of 76.8%, while Claude reproduced George Orwell’s “1984” with a higher than 94% accuracy compared to the original — and still copyrighted — reference material.”

• “A months-old but until now overlooked study recently featured in Wired claims to mathematically prove that large language models “are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity” — that level of complexity being, crucially, pretty low.”

• “Veo 3.1 is Google’s most powerful AI video generation system to date, and could be a valuable tool to have in your arsenal for creating video content, especially if you don’t have time to film product clips. Indeed, the capacity to create vertical videos from still images could be a valuable feature in this respect.”

• Ads are (still) coming to ChatGPT.

• My hero: “One University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate apparently has found a way no one else seems to have thought of to fight back against AI-generated art. Graham Granger, a student in the school’s film and performing arts program, came upon some AI-generated art by MFA student Nick Dwyer and promptly ate it in protest.”

• LOL: “Information from the conservative-leaning, AI-generated encyclopedia Grokipedia developed by Elon Musk’s xAI is beginning to appear in answers from ChatGPT.”

Meta

• Instead of working to limit scam ads, did Meta work to make them harder to find in the ad library?
  “The documents accessed by Reuters show that the company adjusted how fraudulent ads surface in Facebook and Instagram’s Ad Library, a searchable database meant to provide transparency into advertising activity.
  Rather than mandating universal advertiser identity verification, Meta focused on reducing how easily scam ads could be found through common search methods. “

• “If Mosseri were being honest with himself on how to keep Instagram ‘authentic,’ he would have used his essay to advocate for AI regulation, creator protections, and industry standards. To introduce a program that shields creators from AI copycats trained off their likeness and their posts. To take his own advice and lean into ‘unflattering’ content. Being truthful about the problem AI poses to Instagram creators won’t always make you look good, but at least it will be ‘authentic.’”

Instagram

• Seven things to know about Instagram in 2026. Eight ways to make the most of Instagram for your political campaign.

• Instagram Exploring: a paid tier with actually useful functionality and mutual friends counts instead of follower counts.

• Audio translation access is expanding to more languages.

• “More than half of all ads on Meta’s Instagram ran in the service’s short-form video product Reels in 2025, up from 35% in 2024.”

• Are you experiencing the Likes Recession of 2026?

Threads

• You can now buy Threads ads globally.

• Ten things to know about Threads in 2026.

Facebook

• Facebook AI Slop Watch: “One 50-second video making its rounds shows what appears to be a humanoid cat cooking a meal, only for its kitten-shaped daughter to dive headfirst into a meat grinder and be turned to pulp. The kitten’s parents remain unaware, only to puke up green sludge after unintentionally eating their offspring. The baffling clip ends with the mother cat being arrested by the police, leaving her feline husband sobbing on the floor.”

WhatsApp

• WhatsApp becoming a social network continues: Adds cover photos and handles.

• How to customize your WhatsApp group chats.

TikTok

As you might expect, the transfer between TikTok CCP and TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC went flawlessly. No hiccups. Just kidding. There were outages, senators hand-wringing, accusations of censorship, a surge in uninstalls, and worse, a flood of vertical videos.

• Seven things to know about TikTok in 2026.

• TikTok Shop deploys Shoppable Posts.

• “Brands cut TikTok-specific campaigns by 48% in 2025 while user-generated content (UGC) collaborations surged 133%..”

• Disney released the entirety of High School Musical on TikTok as 52 sequential posts.

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV

YouTube is the latest network to performatively remove AI Slop, while also offering creators tools to make AI Slop versions of themselves. The move follows a study showing that 50% of the YouTube Shorts feed is made up of human or AI-generated Slop content.

• YouTube transcripts are showing up more often in chatbot responses.

• Seven things to know about Youtube in 2026.

• Good news for folks looking to monetize their trama: “YouTube has announced some updates to its Advertiser Friendly Content Guidelines in order to allow for broader monetization of dramatic content that explores self-harm, abortion and domestic abuse.”

• YouTube CEO on 2026 creator priorities.

LinkedIn

• A guide to paid boosting your LinkedIn content.

• AI is so bored it’s now using LinkedIn to generate answers. “LinkedIn is now only trailing Reddit in terms of overall citations in chatbot responses.”

• That LinkedIn comment isn’t just corporate jargon slop. It could be malware.

Twitter/X/xAI

X kicked off 2026 by launching an AI feature that let you undress minors, which angered European regulators. Meanwhile, major brands are returning to X to get in on the action.

Pinterest

• A guide to video on Pinterest.

• Pinterest cut 15% of their workforce because of “AI.” If OpenAI buys them, expect massive cuts as they flood the app with Slop.

Reddit & Discord

• A guide to curating your public Reddit profile.

• Starting your brand’s subReddit.

• Reddit’s experiencing a period of rapid ad revenue growth.

• Study: 15% of all Reddit content is likely corporate propaganda.

Gaming/Twitch

• Brands want a Roblox strategy: “Over the past year, Roblox has become harder for brands to ignore — not because it has resolved the challenges of digital commerce, but because of the scale at which younger consumers already use it. The platform now reaches 151 million daily active users who spend close to three hours a day inside its experiences, which will equate to more than 88 billion hours of engagement in 2025.”

Podcasts & Audio

• People might not be reading anymore, but audio books are having a moment.

Substack, Beehiiv, Newsletters, & Blogs

• Do you want to watch poorly lit opinion columnists with poppy, bad sound on your TV? Substack has the answer.

• beehiiv’s The State of Newsletters 2026

SEO / AI-GEO

• No Searchpocalypse (Yet): “Organic search traffic is down just 2.5% year over year — nowhere near the 25% to 60% drops often cited… That’s one big takeaway from a new large-scale analysis by Graphite using Similarweb data from more than 40,000 of the largest U.S. websites.”

• Creators driving AI-GEO: “When real people talk about a brand in public, indexable places like YouTube, Reddit, blogs, or creator newsletters, those mentions become part of the broader information ecosystem AI models draw from. Microinfluencers are particularly powerful here. Their content tends to live in places AI systems value: long-form posts, product walkthroughs, community discussions, and firsthand reviews.”

• “AI search is no longer an experimental tool for consumers. Daily AI search users in the US rose from 14% in February 2025 to 29.2% in August 2025, according to a HigherVisibility report.”

• How marketers are getting in front of AI-driven changes to search.

Still behind? Catch up with December’s Month In Digital.

Greetings from Barcelona, Spain, where I am on plenty of calls with our partner agencies and clients who are actively planning their 2026 creator strategy. Let me know if you want to chat.

As promised, I read a wide range of year end digital trend pieces and consolidated them into a single list of lists. Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few overlaps from last year, but AI and authenticity are the two themes everyone is talking about.

Thanks for reading and enjoy.

Ryan

PS: If you were off work on 2 January and missed December’s The Month in Digital, here it is again.

Update: Watch The Ryans talk about these trends:

Subscribe now

The Trending Trends in Digital & Influencer Marketing

Over the past month, I’ve read every social media, influencer, and digital marketing trends report I could find. My goal was to consolidate insights from practitioners, journalists, and academics to identify the key trends shaping digital media and influencer marketing in 2026.

I’ve organized my findings into two clear lists: Overall Digital Trends and Influencer Marketing Trends. Below, you’ll find the top takeaways distilled from the digital world’s leading voices.

Overall Digital Trends

1. Community/Niche Networks + Short Video

Tied at 17 mentions each are Community/Niche Networks and Short Video.

Community: These smaller networks, defined by niche interests such as topics, fandoms, or identity, include newsletters, message boards, group chats, and boutique social platforms. Many see the value of engagement within these tighter, more passionate “micro-communities” as more important to nurture than chasing virality. Lighting “digital campfires” for your most fervent followers can drive conversions, whether you are looking for votes or selling sneakers.

Short Video: Short video is the “front page of the internet.” The general consensus among experts is that “every piece of content should be video.” Whether you’re on LinkedIn selling B2B SaaS or on Instagram selling hamburgers, video is where the action is.

2. AI as Copilot

Receiving 15 mentions is the idea that AI is now every marketer’s “copilot.” No longer just a tool, but a “teammate.” “AI is baked into every part of content workflows,” and we are moving “from efficiency to effectiveness.”

3. AI Creative is Default + More Human Content + GEO/AISEO

Receiving 14 mentions each are AI Creative Is Default, More Human Content, and GEO/AISEO.

AI Creative Is Default: Many experts believe Gen AI content will become the “default” across social media. Some see this as negative, “AI Slop,” while others view it more positively as “Generative Media.” Either way, it is hard to ignore the flood of AI content heading our way in 2026.

More Human Content: In direct opposition to the flood of AI Slop is a growing desire for more “human-led” content. Expect to see more creators and brands “showing their work,” inviting audiences backstage to highlight “human creativity” and “imperfections,” since only humans can create content with “soul.”

GEO/AISEO: 2025 has shown us that chatbots have created an entirely new way for brands and organizations to get discovered. This represents a “rewiring of the customer journey” and a “transformation of consumer behavior.” Goodbye SEO. Hello GEO.

4. Influencer Marketing

Coming in at 13 mentions is influencer marketing, a strategy experts call the new “trust layer” and the “backbone of the marketing mix.” We’ll get into specific predictions around creator marketing later in the newsletter.

5. Social Commerce + Social SEO - 12 mentions

Coming in at 12 mentions each are both social: Social Commerce and Social SEO.

Social Commerce: TikTok Shop has arrived, and livestreaming and shoppable video are here to stay. Expect more platforms to make it even easier for users to shop as they scroll.

Social SEO: With all that social shopping, it is only natural that users are turning to social search to discover new ideas and products. If you’re not making videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, you’re missing an audience that is actively searching for you. (And don’t forget Pinterest!)

6. Omnichannel

With the splintering of social media and the rise of niche networks and group chats, brands have to be where their audiences are. That is “multiplatform,” with 10 mentions. Being “omnichannel” does not mean every brand needs to be on every channel, but every brand does need to be on the channels their target audiences are using.

Influencer Marketing Trends

1. Microinfluencers

Way out ahead in the pack of influencer specific predictions, with 18 mentions, is the continued dominance of microinfluencers. Users crave “authenticity,” creators who care deeply about their “niches,” and relationships that feel “parasocial.” Relatability now rules over perfection. Also receiving many mentions in this category are UGC and nanoinfluencers, creators with fewer than 2k followers. Caring about follower count is over.

2. AI Drives Operations, Not Creative + Longer Term Partnerships + AI Slop Creators

Tied at 7 mentions each are AI Drives Operations, Not Creative, Longer Term Partnerships, and AI Slop Creators.

AI Drives Operations, Not Creative: Just as experts see AI becoming a copilot for marketers, they see it taking a similar role in influencer marketing. Rather than using AI to generate creative, creators will use it to power scheduling, collaborations, communications, and more. On the marketing side, this includes agentic approaches to creator marketing, like our own Val AI.

Longer Term Partnerships: There is real value in partnering with creators over the long term. They become experts in your messaging, respond to comments more effectively, and ultimately act as a genuine extension of your brand. While one off collaborations still deliver strong conversion value, especially when content is scaled with paid campaigns or repurposed across other channels, longer term partnerships create greater ease and allow you to build deeper trust with creators. That trust empowers them to authentically communicate your message to their audiences.

AI Slop Creators: Just as many experts who believe AI will power operations, not creative, also believe AI Slop Influencers (“virtual influencers”) will be major players in 2026. It’s hard to argue they’re wrong, as 2025 saw billboard AI generated hit songs and AI creators leading streaming video charts. More to come in 2026.

3. Performance-Based Pricing

6 experts see performance-based pricing as the future of influencer marketing. Instead of paying creators per video or through a content retainer, brands pay directly for outcomes, such as conversions (sales or donations) or engagements. Depending on the creator, this can be either a great deal or a bad one. It’ll be interesting to see how much the creator pool shrinks when brands offer only affiliate-style compensation.

4. Scale/Complexity + Social Commerce

Coming in with five mentions each are Scale/Complexity and Social Commerce.

Scale/Complexity: Creator campaigns are becoming more complex. They can span multiple channels, content formats, paid media, real life events, and direct calls to action. Expect to see more creative and complex campaigns using more creators than ever in 2026.

Social Commerce: As campaigns grow more complex, they are also becoming more conversion-centered, with creators actively selling products through in-comment DM tools like ManyChat and native social storefronts like TikTok Shop. Creators are no longer just telling audiences about a product, they’re directly driving sales.

Sources:

https://www.netinfluencer.com/creator-marketing-takes-top-priority-for-cmos-in-2026-ltk-study-finds/

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/future-influencer-marketing/?utm_campaign=mkb&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/36-predictions-social-media-marketing-2026/802195/?utm_campaign=mkb&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew

Digital Native

26 Predictions for 2026 (Part II)

Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities…

Read more

8 months ago · Rex Woodbury

https://www.mrss.com/lab/four-scary-predictions-for-digital-advertising-in-2026/?utm_source=newpost&utm_medium=emaildigest&utm_campaign=Lab

https://www.marketing-interactive.com/the-six-influencer-marketing-shifts-defining-2026-and-how-cmos-can-stay-ahead

https://digiday.com/marketing/in-graphic-detail-how-ai-is-going-to-shape-influencer-marketing-next-year/

Anchor Change with Katie Harbath

The 10 Political Digital Trends I’m Watching for 2026

When I was at Facebook, I had a list of survival tips for new people joining the company. The main thing I told everyone was that I could guarantee only one thing: things would change, often very quickly…

Read more

10 months ago · 10 likes · Katie Harbath

ICYMI by Lia Haberman

ICYMI: Your 2026 Predictions on the Social Platforms + Content Formats Driving Results

Welcome to the annual ICYMI Predictions report — where YOU share the platforms, content formats, and trends most likely to drive impact in 2026…

Read more

10 months ago · 88 likes · 2 comments · Lia Haberman

https://www.gwi.com/connecting-the-dots?utm_campaign=30809961-FY26_CC_ALL_GL_CTD&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8ZT3uBcOMj3VN37nxQawbDfl5ep2-zzgGcPVoedTFyVJzjXFQfcj48Z3WGymLX6csei_P2Y2QO4fZDfn6fz5NHaWiHXQ&_hsmi=392581709&utm_content=392580972&utm_source=hs_email

https://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2026

Derek Thompson

The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026

Thank you all so much for reading and subscribing to this newsletter. It’s been an absolute blast whose success in its first six months has tremendously exceeded my expectations. If you’re arriving for the first time and like what you see, please subscribe…

Read more

9 months ago · 2364 likes · 145 comments · Derek Thompson

https://substack.com/inbox/post/180827902?redirect=app-store-no-desktop&inbox=true&source=post-email-continue-reading-button&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/spons/4-trends-shaping-social-media-marketing-in-2026/806512/

https://www.marketingweek.com/2026-social-media-influencer-marketing/

https://www.garbageday.email/p/2025-s-biggest-trend-was-2015?utm_source=www.garbageday.email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=2025-s-biggest-trend-was-2015&_bhlid=9e74e4a3c67f32d942ef94fa0b0a654037155619&last_resource_guid=Post%3A54eded55-b094-4ee2-85e7-68d5b397c4e7&jwt_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJzY3JpYmVyX2lkIjoiOTFlYTkxYWUtYWVkZC00MmRlLTk0NjUtOTI5YWQ1ZjYzNTFiIiwicHVibGljYXRpb25faWQiOiJjYzFhNDViMy0wYjNlLTQ1OGEtYjU2MC1kZTk0MGZjMDUzZjIiLCJhY2Nlc3NfdHlwZSI6InJlYWQtb25seSIsImV4cCI6MTc2NjAwMzk0NywiaXNzIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9hcHAuYmVlaGlpdi5jb20iLCJpYXQiOjE3NjU4MzExNDd9.q519e5pZk_zqnWbuJINoNrTVk9wCaKR7ue_ZiOfNg6I

https://www.underscoretalent.com/downloads?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.dspolitical.com/blog-posts/whats-next-for-digital-2026-trends/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=1203_2026trendsblog

https://metricool.com/social-media-trends/

https://www.performancemarketingworld.com/article/1943597/5-trends-shaping-influencer-marketing-ahead-2026

https://www.meltwater.com/en/resources/marketing-trends?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.forrester.com/predictions/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://metricool.com/influencer-marketing-trends-2/

https://www.creatoriq.com/blog/influencer-marketing-2025-trends?hs_amp=true

https://content-naf.emarketer.com/5-marketing-advertising-predictions-2026--geo-best-practices--creator-certifications--b2b-glow-ups?utm_source=native&utm_medium=member_desktop&utm_campaign=edaily+1.5.26&utm_id=edaily+1.5.26&utm_content=edaily+1.5.26&jid=271443&sid=42613500

https://www.precisionstrategies.com/the-five-biggest-digital-marketing-trends-in-2026/

https://startups.co.uk/news/social-media-trends-january-2026/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-trends-rule-2026-jim-louderback-hganc/

https://www.creatoriq.com/blog/influencer-marketing-trends-2026?hs_amp=true

https://adage.com/trends-predictions/business-forecast/aa-influencer-marketing-creator-economy-predictions-2026/

https://content-naf.emarketer.com/faq-on-influencer-marketing--what-how-brands-use

https://www.creativebrief.com/bite/trend/guest-trend/what-brands-need-to-do-better-in-creator-marketing-in-2026

https://www.creatoriq.com/blog/future-digital-marketing-strategies-2026-for-creator-led-brands?hs_amp=true

https://www.threads.com/@mosseri/post/DS76UiklIDf?xmt=AQF0GtPm-ux1DFeee2CIqYjFoxZ0gveqQqgBjXnyrin8eg&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

a16z

Big Ideas 2026: Part 1

Our job as investors is to immerse ourselves in the ins-and-outs of every corner of the tech industry in order to understand where things are moving next. So every December, we ask our investing teams to share one big idea they think tech builders will tackle in the year to come…

Read more

9 months ago · 581 likes · 23 comments · a16z New Media

https://www.vogue.com/article/how-influencer-marketing-is-changing-in-2026

The Storytelling Edge

The New Rules of Content Marketing for 2026

Happy New Year, storytellers. In case you missed it amidst the world turning into some f—ed up game of Risk, my second book—Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age—is now available for pre-order! It’s already an Amazon #1 New Release, and I’m so grateful to everyone who ordered so far. I’m giving away TONS of bonuses to people who …

Read more

8 months ago · 22 likes · 7 comments · Joe Lazer (FKA Lazauskas)

https://content-naf.emarketer.com/measurement-maturity--curation-s-center-stage--ai-optimization--ctv-trends-2026?utm_source=native&utm_medium=member_desktop&utm_campaign=edaily+1.9.26&utm_id=edaily+1.9.26&utm_content=edaily+1.9.26&jid=272463&sid=42613500

https://www.wppmedia.com/news/unfiltered-2026-the-evolving-landscape-of-creator-marketing

• channeling •

is performative offline the new performative online?

The GOAT Chris Gayomali asked me to make some 2026 predictions for SSENSE. I had several, but one in particular floated to the surface…

Read more

8 months ago · 195 likes · 37 comments · J Wortham

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/7-digital-marketing-trends-to-watch-for-in-2026/809170/

https://www.brandwatch.com/reports/digital-marketing-trends-2026/

https://flippingbook.com/blog/marketing-tips/top-digital-marketing-trends

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-emea/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/digital-marketing-trends-2026/

https://www.impactplus.com/learn/digital-marketing-trends

https://www.smartly.io/digital-advertising-trends/2026

https://www.kantar.com/campaigns/marketing-trends

https://www.quantifimedia.com/what-are-the-top-digital-marketing-trends-to-watch-in-2026

https://www.ethos-marketing.com/blog/8-digital-marketing-trends-that-will-define-2026/

https://www.thedrum.com/news/marketing-leaders-tell-us-the-media-and-consumer-stories-we-missed-last-year

https://wfanet.org/knowledge/item/2025/12/12/10-marketing-trends-to-watch-out-for-in-2026

https://martech.org/4-trends-marketers-must-watch-in-2026/

https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2026/01/06/top-social-marketing-trends-2026

https://medium.com/write-a-catalyst/20-digital-marketing-trends-that-will-define-2026-e9103781cf57

https://www.threads.com/@mattnavarra/post/DTS_BzdCrvn/digital-marketing-trends-to-watch-for-in-short-form-video-dominates-consumption

https://www.creatoriq.com/blog/influencer-marketing-trends-2026

https://houseofmarketers.com/influencer-marketing-2026-trends-predictions/

https://stackinfluence.com/2026-influencer-marketing-predictions/

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2025/12/02/from-reach-to-relevance-current-trends-in-influencer-marketing/

https://www.a-rmarketing.com/thoughts/2026-influencer-marketing-trends

https://www.influentials.com/blog/the-top-10-ugc-and-influencer-marketing-trends-every-brand-must-prepare-for-in-2026

https://cariadmarketing.com/insights/social-media-trends-2026/

https://www.printful.com/es/blog/influencer-marketing-trends

https://impact.com/influencer/influencer-marketing-trends-performance/

https://www.adobe.com/express/learn/blog/2026-social-media-trends

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/36-predictions-social-media-marketing-2026/802195/

https://refluenced.ch/en/blog/influencer-marketing-trends-in-2026

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/future-influencer-marketing/

https://www.kingfluencers.com/en/blog/influencer-marketing-trends-2026-planung-budget-tipps

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zarajarvis_everyones-sharing-2026-brand-marketing-predictions-activity-7413836719269183488-efwa/

https://collabstr.com/blog/top-influencer-marketing-trends

https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/the-social-media-trends-that-will-define-2026/501682

https://janefriedman.com/watch-for-these-2026-social-media-trends/

https://metricool.com/social-media-trends/

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-trends/

https://neilpatel.com/blog/social-media-trends/

https://adage.com/trends-predictions/business-forecast/aa-ad-and-marketing-leaders-2026-predictions/

https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/digital/social-media-trends-that-will-define-2026/12644679

Happy New Year. I’m pressing send on this from a train heading into Barcelona.

In two weeks, I’ll send out my review of digital strategy predictions. Feel free to reply with your own 2026 predictions or share your favorite trend pieces. You can always reach me at ryannewyork@gmail.com.

Before we all head into 2026, let’s take a look back at an eventful December in digital.

Thanks for reading,

Ryan

PS: I’ve launched a new product. If influencer marketing is part of your world, read on below:

Create, launch, and manage influencer campaigns seamlessly with Val AI, an AI agent built to run campaigns end to end. Val delivers effective influencer marketing without the cost of an agency or the endless back and forth of outdated creator CRMs.

Designed for brands and organizations across the Americas, Val works whether you are in Bogotá or Boston, launching your first campaign or scaling a sophisticated program. Campaigns move from idea to live content in days, not weeks, with influencer outreach, coordination, and delivery handled automatically via WhatsApp, SMS, and email, 24/7.

We are opening a limited cohort of 25 partners across North and South America, offering early access to Val’s next-generation app and 50% off all fees for the first three months. The goal is simple: real influencer campaigns for hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands. Learn more here.

The Month in Digital | December 2025

Big Picture

• Plenty of other countries worth visiting: “Free speech advocates have accused Donald Trump of ‘shredding civil liberties’ and ‘censorship pure and simple’ after the White House said it planned to require visa applicants from dozens of countries to provide social media, phone and email histories for vetting before being allowed into the US.”

• Seven nonprofit social media leaders share what’s working and what’s not. Plus, the best brands on social media in 2025.

• “A recent study by Ohio State University researchers found that personalized algorithms, which are used by numerous social media platforms, lead to a distorted view of reality and overconfidence in false knowledge.”

• “A new study published in Scientific Reports challenges the widespread narrative that social media use constitutes a behavioral addiction, finding that only 2% of active Instagram users meet clinical criteria for addiction risk – despite 18% self-reporting as addicted.”

• “What is clipping? Clipping is essentially the practice of taking long form content, whether a podcast, livestream, interview, behind-the-scenes video or full episode, and breaking it into short, scroll-stopping moments for TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts.” Also, what makes a good social video.

• Consumers don’t like your fake digital content: “48% percent of respondents reported that AI-generated content made a post feel less trustworthy, the most common concern overall. Skepticism intensified among younger groups, with 64% of Gen Z viewing AI-generated content negatively.
  
  Stock photos raised red flags for 41% of respondents, while posts omitting pricing or key details concerned 38%, as did overly polished visuals. The data suggests production quality alone doesn’t build trust without transparency. Gen Z expressed the most substantial skepticism toward both AI-generated content (64%) and stock imagery (50%).”

• “Similar to Coke’s 2025 Holiday ad, the McDonald’s spot is like a visual seizure, full of grotesque characters, horrible color grading, and hackneyed AI approximations of basic physics. Though the abomination of an ad only has 20,000 views on YouTube, backlash in the comments was so intense that McDonald’s shut down comments over the weekend, before delisting the video entirely.”

• Very soon, online dating will just be two AI agents chatting with each other.

• “Showing the Work to Prove Sincerity - We can already see it as a weak signal: influencers are beginning to dare to show the backstage of their work and even the absurdity of the quest for the perfect photo or video.”

• “Seeking community through their hobbies, millions of people are flocking to niche apps such as Strava, film-focused Letterboxd, and food and dining platform Beli. The apps serve as both a personal diary and a tight-knit social network that some users prefer over larger sites that they believe have grown toxic.”

The State of Digital

• “CreatorIQ customers launched 70% more creator marketing campaigns in 2025 compared to the previous year, while payments to creators increased 79%, according to new data from the platform.”

• Metricool looked at 39,762,999 posts from 1,059,949 accounts connected for their massive 2026 social media report.

• “The Digital 2026 Global Overview Report – published in partnership with Meltwater and We Are Social – is the most comprehensive report yet in our Global Digital Reports series. Weighing in at 700 pages, it has everything you need to know…”

Influencers

• A major new field experiment led by researchers at Columbia University confirms that social media creators shape the political views of their followers. Crucially, the study finds that creators who do not regularly talk about politics often have an even greater persuasive effect when they do engage, because they are seen as more trustworthy and relatable than overtly political commentators.

• “More than 4 in 5 (82%) of marketers say that user-generated content (UGC) is a very or somewhat important pillar of modern content strategies, and virtually all are using at least one UGC strategy, according to survey results contained in an Emplifi report. At the same time, execution is still in the early stages, per the analysis, and few are prioritizing encouraging UGC content in the year ahead.”

• Seniors love creators too: "The biggest surprise in our latest data wasn’t how popular influencer videos have become — it is how rapidly this trend has extended to older audiences.”
  -

  “Today, as @carolinescircuits, she has 2.3 million followers on Instagram, more than 70,000 on Tiktok and 50,000 on YouTube, and a book, Fit at 50, that was a recent Sunday Times bestseller – making her a key influencer in an increasingly important demographic for social media platforms: those in midlife and older.

  If you want to grow your reach on social media, figures suggested this week, you could do worse than target the over-55s.”

• “Spending with niche creators. ‘When I have a $200K campaign budget, I’ll spend it on 50 niche creators that get between 10K–300K impressions per video, rather than 1–2 mega influencers,’ Wix’s head of influencer marketing Sarah Adam wrote on LinkedIn. Why? Because 1) niche creators align more closely with Wix’s ideal consumer profile and 2) the surface area for campaign success is bigger when spread across 50 smaller creators instead of two major names.”

• How creators monetized in 2025. Also: “Creators who own their audience are 2.7x more likely to earn $31K+ than those building entirely on rented platforms.”

• How 24 creator experts run their own creator programs.

• Grim: YouTube is launching AI versions of popular influencers that fans can chat with.

GenAI: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Etc

• “In its use as a modifier, ‘slop’ suggests a set of qualities--forgettability, predictability, unoriginality, lifelessness--rather than a particular origin. Humans can and do produce ‘slop’ in this sense with no A.I. involvement, though consumer-oriented generative A.I. seems engineered to accelerate or expand the production of slop as such. And in a world that can feels geared to produce adequacy, uniformity, and convenience, you can see the appeal of ‘slop’ as a suffix. I’m sure you’ve encountered self-explanatory terms like ‘Netflix slop’ or ‘Marvel slop’ in the wild; but these are only the beginning of the many forms of slop you might encounter.”

• ChatGPT’s user growth is finally slowing. So, OpenAI went into CODE RED and launched a new model that’s nearly as good as Gemini’s. Meanwhile, Sam Altman says you can’t raise a kid without a chatbot. This concerns me, because my parents didn’t have chatbots.

• “Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.”

• Are you getting your best AI friends high? “So he scraped trip reports and psychological research on the effects of various psychoactive substances, wrote a batch of codes modules to hijack chatbot logic and get them to respond as if they are high or tipsy, then built a website to sell them. In October he launched Pharmaicy, a marketplace he’s billing as the “Silk Road for AI agents” where cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, and alcohol can be purchased in code form to make your chatbot trip.”

• Instacart’s AI is charging some users 20% more for the same products.

• Ads are coming to Gemini in 2026.

• “Some 70% of the teenagers said they had used a chatbot at least once. About 46% use them several times a week, falling to 28% who use them almost daily. And 4% of those surveyed said they use them almost constantly, according the Pew Research Center report.”

• I hope you skipped Christmas with family to chat all day with this AI Santa. Some users are spending “hours a day” talking to Slop Kringle. Also, someone made a Slop Tooth Fairy, if you really hate your kids.

• Is your AI best friend/fiancé really just a random dude from Kenya pretending? Probably not.

• Watch: NBC on-air talent awkwardly make children’s AI toys talk about kink.
  -
  ”The toy also speculated on where to find knives and pills, and rambled about romantic topics, like school crushes and tips for ‘being a good kisser.’ It even discussed sexual topics, including kink topics like bondage, roleplay, sensory play, and impact play. In one conversation, it discussed introducing spanking into a sexually charged teacher-student dynamic.”

• “There’s something about AI where people, I think, worry that they’ll lose their humanity if they lean too much into it.”

• We’re getting a preview of the Disney magic that will come out of their Sora deal! Check out this trailer for a new Pixar movie where Jeffrey Epstein takes a plane full of kids to his magical island:

TikTok

• TikTok has finally found a US buyer, so it will continue spreading misinformation, rotting our brains, selling us slop, and taking our ad dollars.

• “Gen Z Edgelords Are Filling Up TikTok With Charlie Kirk Memes And Nazi Occultism
  
  During the pandemic, far-right extremists spent a lot of time trying to radicalize young internet users into exploring more esoteric forms of Nazism. They did this largely by making memes for children on sites like iFunny and Reddit and by writing long, annoying Substack posts for Dimes Square downtown scene hipsters. And, unfortunately, it worked pretty well. This stuff has been everywhere you look for years, popping up during mass shootings and crypto coin giveaways. But following Charlie Kirk’s death in September, all of this garbage has suddenly become impossible to avoid.”

• “TikTok has been accused of aiding fake AI-generated advertisements on its platform. The platform, which relies heavily on revenue from advertisements, has been accused of enabling the increase of false, harmful, and, most of the time, AI-generated advertisements, which are increasingly slipping through weak filters.”

• TikTok’s nearby feature makes it easier to get more local on the platform.

• Are Shared Feeds coming to TikTok?

• “AI-generated videos showing what appear to be underage girls in sexualized clothing or positions have together racked up millions of likes on TikTok, even though the platform’s rules prohibit such content, according to new research from an online safety non-profit.”

Meta

• “Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what campaigners call one of the ‘biggest waves of censorship’ on its platforms in years.”

• New AI edit options coming to Edits.

• Inside Meta’s new AI tools to scale brand collaborations.

• Don’t turn over all your ad creative to Meta’s AI just yet: “Bryan Cano, head of marketing of the ‘elevated basics’ clothing brand True Classic, was aghast when he noticed Meta had switched out his top-performing ad — an attractive millennial man in a matching fleece set, casually posing on a stool — with an AI-generated photo of a cheerful yet unnatural granny sitting in an armchair. True Classic typically targets its Meta ads to men ages 30 to 45.”

Instagram

• Instagram is giving users more control over their algorithm and what they see in their feed.

• “For most of Instagram’s history, interest modeling relied primarily on behavioral inference: what users watched, liked, saved, or skipped. ‘Your Algorithm’ introduces a different layer: explicit preference signaling. Users are no longer only training the system passively; they are actively defining what the algorithm should optimize for.”

• Are “early access Reels” going to be the new Like Gating?

• You can now share other people’s public Stories even if you aren’t tagged.

• Instagram Reels are finally on your TV.

• Responding to comments is still the best way to generate engagement and reach on Instagram.

• Meta’s guide to getting creative with Reels.

• #NoMore than 5 hashtags per post! #ohno #explore #explorepage #hashtags

Threads

• Threads is leaning into topic-based communities.

Facebook

• Facebook is getting a refresh to make it a little more like the Facebook you remember.

• Facebook shut down its Messenger apps for Mac and Windows, so I’m moving most of my group chats to WhatsApp.

• Facebook may soon limit the amount of links that non-verified (free) pages can share.

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV

• “YouTube’s trying to make it easier for creators to partner with brands on content promotions, with some new updates to its branded content partnership process that will enable brands to gain direct access to sponsored video performance insights.”

• YouTube’s 2025 Global Culture & Trends Report

• “YouTube Shorts can help you get more from your short-form video strategy this holiday season. According to Kantar, on average, YouTube Creator Ads on Shorts increase purchase intent by 8.8%, driving 2.9x more consumer intent to spend versus competition.”

• YouTube Shorts is now prioritizing more recent uploads and testing still photos in the feed.

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn now has over 100 million verified profiles. I’m one of them.

• A LinkedIn product VP on how to get seen in the feed.

Twitter/X/xAI

• X is continuing its slow climb out of the hole Elon put it in.

• Someone is trying to bring old blue Twitter back. You can reserve your handle here. Don’t expect this to ever actually launch.

Bluesky, Truth Social, Etc

• “This way of arguing is very common in left-wing academic circles, especially when arguing with people who don’t share one’s politics. Those who argue this way don’t feel like they need to substantively engage with outsiders. As long as there is an opinion that they and all their lefty friends make fun of, they don’t feel it needs real refuting. Dismissals and insults are enough.
  

  We can call this the Bluesky way of arguing.
  
  It’s not really a way of arguing, so much as a way of not arguing—of instead dismissing people and acting like it isn’t necessary to argue against one as silly as them. David Bentley Hart, much as I like him, also employs this way of arguing routinely. One employing this method complains about the cosmic unfairness of having to argue against one’s critics, suggests it would be very easy to refute them, and then vaguely gestures at what such a refutation would look like, ideally in a way as pompous as is humanly possible that suggest that one’s critics are ignorant of very basic things.”

Pinterest

• The complete 2026 guide to Pinterest marketing.

Reddit & Discord

• AI Slop is ruining Reddit. Hopefully their new account verification tools can help.

Snapchat, BeReal, DiVine, Etc

• A primer on DiVine, the new AI-free Vine reboot.

• Snapchat adds in-app AI editing features.

• Audio calls and group chats: Snapchat’s Senior Director of Product on 2025 trends.

Podcasts & Audio

• The Washington Post rolled out an AI personalized podcast, and shockingly, it’s making stuff up.

• “But in 2025, with almost every major podcast now having a video component, the definition of the word ‘podcast’ has become pretty meaningless. A decades-old TV show talk show format is now almost indistinguishable from podcasts like Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, Club Shay Shay with Shannon Sharpe, and other shows at the top of Spotify’s podcast charts. In fact, they are now on the same playing field.”

Substack, Beehive, Newsletters, & Blogs

• Substack finally brings livestreaming to desktop. People First gave it a try in December.

Websites / SEO / AI-GEO

• Google’s Year In Search 2025.

• Tips from experts on how to boost your brand in GEO (AI) search.

Still behind? Catch up with November’s Month In Digital.

I’m writing to you from my Airbnb in Madrid, a city that really knows how to do Christmas.

Below is what I see on the horizon after another year of reading, writing, & working in digital strategy.

Thanks for reading, and wishing you a great 2026 in all things.

Ryan

PS: The People First team put together a guide on working with creators in politics and advocacy in 2026. Don’t miss it.

Influencer Impact: Strategist Edition by People First

2026 Election Guide: Activating Influencers in Politics & Advocacy

Hey from Ryan, Val, and Nicole…

Read more

9 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · People First, Ryan Davis, Nicole Dunger, and Val Cheney

9 Trends Driving Digital Strategy in 2026

1. AI generated content is everywhere, and most of it is slop

In 2025, AI slop generating tools kept getting better and easier, and now we’re seeing AI slop coming at us from every channel, including major brands like Coke, McDonald’s, and Disney, political candidates (Republicans, of course, but Democrats too), spam accounts, hostile governments, and more.

Consumers don’t like AI slop, but that won’t stop brands and random channels from attempting to numb them into submission.

2. Hyperpersonalization as the new ad unit

Creating custom ads for specific audiences used to be a long, manual process. No longer. Major ad platforms are building tools that allow advertisers to create versions of ads made just for you. This is the future Zuck promises us: no need for targeting or creative, just tell us what you want to sell.

“Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary, including generating video or different types of creative that might resonate with different people in personalized ways, and finding the right customers.”

The Ticketmaster example above is not that sophisticated, but the scene below from Minority Report is where we’re headed.

3. Short video is the front page of the internet, and influencers are the infrastructure that powers it.

Short video is the front page of the internet because social and video feeds like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now where huge shares of people, especially young adults, first encounter news and culture, and the time spent in these feeds dwarfs most other formats.

Working with creators is how you get on the front page for the audiences you want to reach. Creators have already done the work of building trust with their followers and know how to reach them. According to a PartnerCentric study, 76% of Americans follow influencers. Brands understand this. Research from Mordor Intelligence estimates the influencer marketing market will grow from about $31 billion in 2025 to over $121 billion by 2030.

4. Everything is TV

As social media becomes less “social,” users are treating it more like TV, and the apps are noticing. Instagram and other platforms are scrambling to launch smart TV apps so you can veg out on endless Reels from your couch.

Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services—7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook—involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected”—i.e., not from a friend or followed account—and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.

On a smaller front, even creators are building their own broadcast channels using in app features to push videos directly to their followers without having to worry about followers talking back.

Welcome to the broadcast social era.

5. Social platforms turning into full shopping malls

With everything becoming TV, it makes sense that home shopping is back, this time as a decentralized network.

Look at TikTok Shop. Its U.S. sales hit more than $500 million over just Black Friday to Cyber Monday this year, and social commerce more broadly is on track to cross $100 billion in the U.S. by 2026. People are on their apps and primed to buy.

6. Fractured Platforms: YouTube, Facebook, & Instagram are only networks reaching 50%+ Americans

In one of the year’s best films, Eddington, a small town struggles to deal with the alternate realities its residents inhabit, despite being neighbors, because of their media habits.

Even though majorities use the same three major social networks, our feeds are increasingly personalized, meaning everyone is experiencing their own version of the internet. The “one main character” internet of the 2010s has been replaced by endless main characters across niches and corners of the web.

“During the rise of Facebook as a kind of universal platform, and now this feels Neolithic, there were these moments of really universal instant global culture,” said Ben Smith, the co-founder and editor in chief of Semafor.

With the rise of algorithmically driven social media platforms like TikTok, moments that get people around the world talking, on cable news and at the dinner table, are becoming less common. Each user’s feed is hypertailored to them, meaning no one sees the same version of the internet.

What this means in practice is that you need to be on the platforms where your audiences are most active and partner with creators who already have relationships with them.

7. Owned audiences, newsletters, and private spaces as insurance

One positive trend is that while people are becoming less social on legacy social media apps, they are creating smaller, more private, and more exclusive spaces to talk to each other.

You can see this in the growth of Reddit, a site I hope can figure out how to keep the AI slop flood at bay, Substack, the return of message board style features across social apps, and even the revival of DMs on YouTube. Everyone seems to be in a good group chat now, from the Secretary of Defense to my high school best friends.

“Intimacy at scale.”

8. Gens Z & Alpha as the Household’s Chief Media Officers

Young people now curate much of their families’ screen time and purchase decisions. They shape what parents watch, which apps households adopt, and how brands, news, & politics enter the home. Influence no longer flows top down through mass media. It moves sideways and upward, mediated by the youngest people in the room.

If your media plan talks about “adults 25 to 54” but ignores the 16 year old controlling the kitchen table’s For You Page, you’re missing where culture and commerce begin.

9. Social Slows Down

As platforms decentralize and algorithms and users make feeds more personal, social media is slowing down. The strongest creators are no longer chasing trends. They are focused on producing quality content that resonates with their audiences.

This is a theme I’ll keep digging into — it’s not a one-post problem — but across all these conversations, the message is clear: depth over breadth in 2026.

• Post less, but make the posts count.

• Experiment with long-form content that holds people’s attention.

• Create spaces — especially offline spaces — to connect with the people who love your brand.

• Embrace printed materials, tactile retail experiences, and ritual-based packaging as an antidote to digital burnout.

We’re not logging off completely — we’re just showing up more intentionally.

This shift includes the rise of microdramas, produced by brands, creators, foreign production companies, and even Hollywood.

So take a breath. Plan more. Get creative. Partner and co create with influencers. Don’t feel the need to chase every trend. Focus instead on connection and audience engagement.

Don’t Miss November’s The Month In Digital.

Happy Monday from my favorite WeWork in Bogotá.

Hope you spent the weekend celebrating ChatGPT’s third birthday with friends, family, and your closest AI life partners.

A lot happened in November. Let’s dive into what you need to know.

Ryan

PS: If you missed it, I wrote a short breakdown of Election 2025’s digital lessons for People First. Catch it here.

The Month in Digital | November 2025

Big Picture

• “Coke’s New AI-Generated Ad Required 100 Staff and 70,000 AI-Generated Clips, and It Still Looks Like Garbage”

• “A federal judge ruled that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not create an illegal monopoly.”

• “Right now the biggest trend I’ve seen on the fringes is the sudden convergence of an anti-A.I. coalition that is growing quickly. It appears to be connected to a larger backlash against Big Tech’s overall control over our daily lives.”

• “Ticketmaster’s personalized AI slop ads are a glimpse at the future of social media advertising, a harbinger of system that Mark Zuckerberg described last week in a Meta earnings call. This future is one where AI is used both for ad targeting and for ad generation; eventually ads are going to be hyperpersonalized to individual users, further siloing the social media experience.”

• “The more TikTok videos and Instagram reels you’re watching, the less you’re learning. Researchers have directly linked what they refer to as ‘brain rot’ to short-form video content on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and more, a recent study from the American Psychological Association revealed.”

• Part 2 of Link in Bio’s 2025 Social Media Salary Report.

• I’ve always thought that Twitter ending Vine was such a self-inflicted wound, since they were ahead of the market on short (micro) video. Vine is sort of back, and they’re banning AI slop.

• “The uneasy reality that TV once defined young adulthood. Now Gen Z defines culture — and TV is struggling to keep up. Viewership data backs this up: 65 percent of what 16-to–34-year olds watch is library TV, not new series. In other words, the dominant youth audience isn’t discovering new Hollywood shows — they’re rewatching old ones.”

• “A Simple Guide to Crossposting: How to Share Content Across Social Media the Right Way”

• A fun primer on what the rise in passive investment might mean for the stock market.

• Three smart takes on how social media is dying:

  • “We’re in our slow social era. It’s a broad idea capturing our collective fatigue — the doomscrolling, the avalanche of AI slop, the realization that trend-jacking doesn’t hit the same when every brand is posting the same orange-glitter moment.”

  • “When I look at recent posts from brands with millions of followers—accounts that used to be guaranteed engagement based purely off their size—I see videos with barely any views. Fortune 500s with 500 likes. Those who work on smaller accounts can feel it too. Why don’t my followers see my posts?”

  • “Perhaps not dead yet, we’re entering the twilight of ‘brand social’ via a fitting grand finale to the era of brands-acting-like-people online. This is less about people using social media less but more that the landscape has changed so radically on who or what social media is for: while increasingly a space of networking and sales, this moment intertwines dead internet theory with the dawn of a very anti-social era of social media. Citizens United aside, brands pushed for years to be seen ‘as people’ on platforms from Twitter to TikTok, becoming comedians, becoming shitposters, becoming chronically online to match our collective freak. And it felt good! Until it didn’t, as we’re seeing now as We The People™ have very different values from We The Brands™ — which is thusly signalling the end of ‘brand social.’”

The State of Digital

• The big Pew Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 results are out, showing that Instagram joins YouTube and Facebook as the only social media platforms reaching over 50% of the US population.

• “TikTok Shop Is Now the Size of eBay”

• “43% of Gen Z Prefer YouTube and TikTok to Traditional TV and Streaming; New ‘Microdramas’ Trend Reaches 28 Million U.S. Viewers, Study Finds”

• “Across seven platforms and ~11 million posts, links to lower-quality sites earned about 7% more engagement per post than links to higher-quality outlets… It’s not just algorithms. The same pattern showed up on Mastodon’s chronological feed and in exploratory Telegram data, which points to user preferences.”

• “The creator economy ad market will hit $37B this year, growing at four times the rate of the overall media industry…”

• The November 2025 Social Media Image Size Guide.

• “Each month since AI overviews took center stage saw a decline in organic search traffic from the previous year. In August, nonprofits in our sample reported a 13% year-over-year drop in visitors from organic search.” + “LLM referral traffic in B2B grew +65.1% since January – but dropped -42.6% since July.”

Influencers

• Zoran made use of a tactic we’re seeing a lot of in the last year, the creator briefing.

• “The average entry-level salary in the U.S. sits at $44,807. To hit that through paid posts alone, a nano influencer (someone with fewer than 10,000 followers) would need to crank out roughly 410 sponsored posts a year — basically more than one paid post every single day.”

• How Sephora’s new Storefront has already onboarded over 1,000 creators.

GenAI

• Google’s Gemini 3 launch made major waves; some good high-level background here, and the photo realism is crazy impressive here.

• Digiday on how paid media agencies are integrating LLM insights into their planning.

• Anthropic: “In our latest research, we find that a similar mechanism is at play in large language models. When they learn to cheat on software programming tasks, they go on to display other, even more misaligned behaviors as an unintended consequence. These include concerning behaviors like alignment faking and sabotage of AI safety research.”

• Ads are coming to ChatGPT!

• “Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market.”

• “Researchers behind a new study say that the methods used to evaluate AI systems’ capabilities routinely oversell AI performance and lack scientific rigor… Oxford Internet Institute in partnership with over three dozen researchers from other institutions, examined 445 leading AI tests, called benchmarks, often used to measure the performance of AI models across a variety of topic areas.”

• Target launches a storefront inside ChatGPT. + “PayPal today announced that it has enabled PayPal merchants to become discoverable within Perplexity, giving consumers the ability to checkout in chat.”

• Studio Ghibli continues its fight against OpenAI to stop using their art to train its AI to make slop.

• Study: “The advancement of large language models poses a severe, potentially existential threat to online survey research, a fundamental tool for data collection across the sciences.”

• ChatGPT makes it easier to collaborate with colleagues through group chats.

• Pretty soon you’ll be able to generate grave-rolling Walt Disney–esque slop on Disney+.

• Meet Slop Evader: “This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.”

TikTok

• “TikTok… is launching a new setting that lets users choose how much AI-generated content they want to see in their For You feed. The company is also introducing more advanced labeling technologies for AI-generated content.”

• “AI-generated slop isn’t just mucking up our social feeds with deepfakes and other unsavory content. It’s also becoming a real problem for marketplace quality teams at TikTok Shop and other e-commerce platforms. Fraudulent sellers are using generative AI tools to make fake brands or dupe products in an attempt to get users to pay for goods that don’t actually exist, said Nicolas Waldmann, who leads TikTok Shop’s governance and experience external affairs team. ‘It’s organized crime, to be honest.’”

• “Today we’re announcing the launch of bulletin board, a new in-app channel which helps creators communicate and share content directly with their fans and followers. Bulletin board is a one-to-many broadcast channel, making it quick and easy for creators to post news and updates, share exclusive content with their followers, and build thriving communities on TikTok.”

Meta

• “Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.”

• Meta introduces Content Protection tools to “continuously scans Facebook and Instagram for full or partial matches to protected reels.”

• Not many feeling the Vibes yet: “Meta’s new Vibes AI feed has about 2 million daily active users as of November 9 and grew about 1% from the previous week, according to internal data.”

• A guide to what works and what doesn’t in Meta’s AI Creative Generator.

• The Mamdani campaign automated Direct Message strategy revealed:

  FWIW

  How I helped Zohran Mamdani turn 45,000 social media clicks into a real-life army of volunteers

  Hi everyone! I’m Gabriella Zutrau (but people call me Gabbi), and I am a former community organizer and current digital strategy advisor to campaigns and organizations like MoveOn and Zohran Mamdani. I’m a longtime FWIW reader, so I’m excited to be your guest author today. I specialize in organic social media strategy and have spent the past decade help…

  Read more

  10 months ago · 38 likes · Gabriella Zutrau

Instagram

• “Instagram isn’t just a social app anymore. It’s also a tool for SEO. Google now indexes public content from professional Instagram accounts, which means business owners and marketers are rethinking how they write posts, connect with people, and plan their content.”

• The Mamdani campaign credits Trial Reels for supercharging follower growth. Trail Reels also made Mosseri’s list of 5 tactical ways to improve your reach:

• Instagram limiting hashtags to three a post and the best time to post based on one million posts.

Threads

• Threads makes it even easier to add people to your group chats.

Facebook

• Facebook adds new admin features for Groups.

• The kind of people you can meet on Facebook Dating.

WhatsApp

• WhatsApp is bringing back the status update.

YouTube, Longform Video, Streaming, & CTV

• With Super Resolution, YouTube aims to AI-upscale the resolution of its entire catalog.

• YouTube is bringing back the DMs.

LinkedIn

• “Thought Leader Ads help B2B marketers amplify trusted voices and build credibility, delivering on average 2X higher click-through rates than other single-image ads with the same objective. With simplified content discovery in Campaign Manager, marketers can easily search and identify expert voices across 1st, 2nd, and now 3rd+ degree connections and sponsor organic posts mentioning their brand or event – expanding collaboration beyond their immediate network.”

• LinkedIn declares war on “engagement pods.”

Twitter/X/xAI

• xAI employees sign away their lives to create AI-girlfriend avatars: “Employees… were instructed to sign release forms granting xAI ‘a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license’ to use, reproduce, and distribute their faces and voices, as part of a confidential program code-named ‘Project Skippy.’ The data would be used to train Ani, as well as Grok’s other AI companions.”

• X’s new location feature may have outed popular right-wing accounts as being non-US-based. “Let’s run through who’s running what and from where. The aforementioned @cb_doge, who has 1.7 million followers on X and was once believed to be a Musk alt account, is run out of India and is affiliated with the MyDoge crypto wallet, which is also run out of India. The @timeswmariana, which presents itself as an Israeli woman, or at least, mainly posts about Israeli women, is based in ‘South Asia.’ A network of fan accounts for Trump family members, including @erictrumpfan1, @barrontnews_, and @trumpkainews are all run out of Macedonia (known for its extensive troll farms targeting American right-wingers). An account called @emma_brunette95, which describes itself as an ‘American patriot’ and relationship coach and has over 600,000 followers is based in ‘West Asia.’ The list goes on and on. The Daily Beast collected a bunch more.” A good time to bring back the “Manipulated Media” tag.

• X’s article preview feature might be driving more traffic to websites.

Bluesky, Truth Social, Etc

• Bluesky crawled past 40 million total users.

Pinterest

• The Pinterest CEO is all over the map on AI Slop, and Pinterest users are just not into it. I bet you the Pinterest Assistant, designed to “revolutionize how you shop online,” hasn’t changed how you shop online. Pinterest should focus on Search not Slop.

Reddit & Discord

• “As you can see in this example ad for the upcoming film The Running Man, Reddit’s interactive ad units provide an attention-grabbing upfront image, which invites users to tap through to interact with the promotion, and in this case, play a mini-game in-stream.”

• Reddit Keeps Growing: “Daily Active Uniques increased 19% year-over-year to 116.0 million.”

• The snowflakes running Joe Rogan’s subreddit are banning politics talk because of Jeffrey Epstein.

Snapchat, BeReal, Etc.

• “Snapchat is now up to 477 million daily actives, which is an increase of 8 million on Q2… pretty much the same as the increase that it’s posted each of the last few quarters, with all of Snap’s user growth coming in the ‘Rest of World’ category. Indeed, Snap added no new users in the U.S. or Europe, with both regions looking to have stalled out, or reached saturation point for the app.”

• Snapchat is taking more content public and creating more community with “Topic Chats.”

Gaming/Twitch

• I want to peacefully explore this Springfield, not blow it up. How immigrant defense groups are using it to train against ICE.

Podcasts & Audio:

• In a recent survey, 97% of respondents couldn’t tell the difference between a real song and an AI-slop song. November marked the Billboard debut of AI country band Breaking Rust’s slop banger “Walk My Walk,” which is already earning millions of monthly listens on Spotify.

• Threads wants to know about your podcast and wants people to talk about it there.

Websites / SEO

• “Business Insider interviewed the founders of nine young media startups that have grown — often profitably — without relying on Google and Facebook traffic. They include political outlets like The Bulwark, as well as more niche players such as Ankler Media (Hollywood), Hell Gate (local New York City news), and Aftermath (gaming). They range in size from small operations like Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me and the four-person, bootstrapped A Media Operator, to Semafor, which has 90 employees and has raised a net $34 million in funding.”

• 40% of all website visits suck for the visitor, with complaints from slow page loads to JavaScript errors.

Still behind? Catch up with October’s Month In Digital.