Social Media Buzz Weekly: Roundup of Social Media Updates
- ClickInsights
- Aug 29
- 7 min read
Welcome to Social Media Buzz Weekly, your weekly bulletin of the latest social media updates. With the social media landscape evolving with each passing day, it can be challenging to keep a tab on the rapid developments. Well, not anymore, as we have taken it upon ourselves to keep you abreast of every happening in the social media space.
So, without any further ado, let’s look at some of the most significant developments from the last week in the world of social media.
1. Meta Stands To Benefit From White House Opposition to the EU DSA
The White House has signaled that it’s planning to take a stronger stand against the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which has cost Meta, in particular, billions in fines in recent years.
Meta stands to avoid billions in fines each year as a result of pushing back against the DSA. Over the past few years, Meta has been fined over a billion U.S. dollars every year by EU authorities, for issues related to data breaches, the linking of Facebook Marketplace to Facebook, alleged tax fraud, and more.
2. Meta Rolls Out AI-Powered Audio Translations for Video
Meta is looking to expand access to more content in the app, by enabling audio translations of content, using its advancing AI translation tools, which are even able to simulate lip movements to line up with audio translations.
Facebook users will now be able to view certain content in another spoken language, using Meta AI’s evolving audio translation elements, which can make it look like the people in the video are speaking in a different dialect. Meta’s been developing this for some time, with its latest advances in AI re-creation now enabling a broad rollout of the option, beginning with auto translations from English to Spanish (and the reverse).
3. Meta Adds More AI-Powered Ad Options for Holiday Planning
Meta has outlined some new ad tools, primarily guided by its evolving AI targeting, which are designed to help marketers “sleigh” their sales goals this holiday season.
Firstly, Meta is adding more language and region filters to cater to a businesses’ geography, as it onboards more creators globally to Instagram’s creator marketplace. Meta is also giving brands a new way to work with creators via partnership ads, by combining partnership promotions with Advantage+ catalog matching. This now includes the option to add a partnership ‘intro card’ from a new or existing partnership ad onto a catalog carousel ad.
4. Meta Rolls Out Changes to Its Ad Billing Settings
Meta has quietly rolled out a couple of tweaks to its ad spending and charging process, which could impact your campaign performance and costs.
First off, Meta recently changed the wording of its overview of how and when you’ll be charged for Meta ads, with upfront billing now being put into effect. Previously, Meta explained that advertisers will be automatically charged for their ads whenever they spend up to their set payment threshold. They’ll then be charged again at their monthly bill date if there are any leftover costs.
5. Meta Partners With Midjourney To Improve Visual Generation Elements
Meta has announced a new partnership with Midjourney, which will see Meta’s AI tools benefit from Midjourney’s image and video generation knowledge, as it seeks to maximize its tools.
Midjourney is an industry leader in visual generation via AI, with its tools now advancing into video generation in various forms. The collaboration should see Meta’s AI generation tools get an upgrade, which could see big benefits for advertisers and marketers who are making use of Meta’s latest AI models to build better looking ads.
6. TikTok Adds Campus Verification To Help College Students Connect
TikTok has announced a new feature to help students connect with their classmates in the app.
Called Campus Verification, the feature enables students to add their college campus to their TikTok profile, providing another means to search for others in the same year. Campus Verification will provide a means to connect with others on campus, and find out info about others in the same year. In addition, TikTok says that it’s working with student verification platform UNiDAYS to add an extra checking layer to the process.
7. TikTok Announces New Content Partnership With the ATP
TikTok has announced a new partnership with the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), which will see the app host an expanded range of exclusive ATP tour content throughout the season.
TikTok’s global partnership with the ATP will see official accounts sharing more updates, including top stars who are already gaining traction in the app. The new partnership will facilitate further content collaborations, and ensure that TikTok remains a key consideration for tennis fans.
8. TikTok Announces Finale of ‘Music on Stage’ Competition
TikTok has announced a new “Music on Stage” performance event, which will serve as the finale to its musician discovery competition, which has been taking place in the app over the past few weeks.
Back in July, TikTok announced the launch of its Music on Stage competition, inviting musicians of all types to enter their tracks by posting a video of them performing their music, and using the hashtag #MusicOnStage. TikTok also launched its “Next Up: Live Music” singing competition in the U.S. at around the same time, which is an American Idol-style singing competition conducted via TikTok Live streams. The two events are similar, but separate, with Music on Stage instead focused on recording artists more broadly, as opposed to only singers.
9. TikTok Enables Livestreamers To Perform Specific Actions for Donations
TikTok is giving some live streamers access to “Viewer Wishes,” which enables them to set up performative responses that they’ll undertake on streams for specific donations.
10. TikTok Joins INTA Counterfeit Goods Education Initiative
As part of its ongoing efforts to improve its in-app shopping experience, TikTok has joined the International Trademark Association’s (INTA) “Unreal” campaign, which aims to raise awareness about counterfeits, and deter people from being duped by fake listings.
The Unreal campaign, which has already been running for over a decade, aims to educate young consumers about the importance of intellectual property, trademarks and brands, and the dangers of purchasing counterfeit products. The initiative is available to all INTA members, across 181 countries, providing capacity for individual sessions and tools to help raise awareness of related concerns.
11. Instagram Adds Retention Metrics for Reels
Instagram has added a couple of additional metrics for Reels creators, providing more data on your content performance, so you can optimize for the most valuable elements.
Instagram has added a new “Retention” chart for each of your Reels, which shows when you lose your audience within the playback. With Retention, you’ll always see a downward slope, but the flatter the line, the more engaged your audience is. Retention shows you the moments in your Reel that keep or lose your viewers’ interest, so you can learn from each Reel you share. Instagram is also replacing “View Rate” with “Skip Rate” in its Insights display. While view rate shows what percentage watched past the first 3 seconds of your Reel, skip rate is the percentage of views from people who decided to skip your reel during those first 3 seconds.
12. Instagram Adds Reels Linking for Multipart Content
Instagram has added a new feature that will enable Reels creators to effectively build their own series, via various Reels clips, by linking Reels to one another in-stream.
By using the new “Link a reel” option within the composer, you can connect up several Reels into an ongoing set. You can also connect older Reels by tapping the overflow menu and selecting the same.
13. Instagram Adds Virtual Pets for Instagram and Horizon Worlds
Instagram’s new virtual pet features are now being rolled out to some users, which enables you to capture photos with your digital companion in the app.
Some users are now being prompted to “Adopt a new best friend” for your Meta avatar, which you can show off on both IG and in Meta’s VR Horizon experience. Through this process, you can create your own, custom virtual pet, with options to select the animal, color, fur patterns, etc.
14. Instagram Chief Says Longer Captions Won’t Increase Reach
While responding to a question in his weekly Q and A session on Instagram Stories, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that longer captions won’t significantly impact your post reach.
Some meme accounts have taken to posting extremely long captions on their IG posts of late, with unrelated technical documents outlined within their long-scrolling text accompaniments. This way, meme accounts get all the usual traction for the meme, while nobody really reads the caption. Essentially, adding an unrelated caption helps to make these posts different enough from the source material to avoid penalty for replication.
15. xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI for Alleged Market Collusion
Elon Musk’s xAI has lodged a lawsuit against both Apple and OpenAI over alleged market collusion, which is designed, xAI claims, to stifle potential competition.
Earlier in the month, after the launch of xAI’s latest Grok 4 model, Musk accused Apple of deliberately restricting promotion of the Grok app, despite its clear popularity. Since Musk made this claim, many AI apps have reached the number one spot in the App Store rankings, including Perplexity, DeepSeek and Meta AI. But for some reason, xAI has launched legal action on this basis either way, alleging that both Apple and OpenAI have “locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing.”
16. Elon Musk Open Sources Grok 2.5
Elon Musk has outlined xAI’s plans to open source all of xAI’s models, with Grok 2.5 being launched on Hugging Face.
That means that anybody can view the weights and processes powering xAI’s models, with Elon vowing to release every Grok model in this way. The idea, then, is to enhance transparency, and ensure trust in xAI’s process.
Wrapping Up
And that was a wrap of this week’s Social Media Buzz. We’ll be back next week with more news and updates for you from the social media world. Till then, stay tuned!
If you want to read more on the latest developments taking place in the social media space, take a look at ClickInsights’ Social Media Buzz, wherein we bring to you monthly reports on everything going on in social media, ranging from platform updates to policy changes that influence the way we market.
16. Elon Musk Open Sources Grok 2.5
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/24/elon-musk-says-xai-has-open-sourced-grok-2-5/
Elon Musk has outlined xAI’s plans to open source all of xAI’s models, with Grok 2.5 being launched on Hugging Face.
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