This Week in Social Media (Aug 25 to Sep 1): the 5 things worth knowing

Figured I'd start doing this every week. The five biggest things that actually happened in social this week, what they mean, and what you can do about them.

The big one is Meta settling the teen-harm lawsuits for up to $18 billion, the largest deal of its kind ever. The money is honestly the least interesting part.

Teens on Facebook and Instagram now get a default 2-hour daily cap, a midnight to 6am blackout, muted notifications during school hours, and non-algorithmic feeds by default. Meta even ran full-page ads daring TikTok and YouTube to match the cap, and France's under-15 ban kicked in the same week.

If your work reaches teens, your window just got smaller, and Meta's trying to drag the whole industry with it. (CNN, Georgia AG)

Over on X, they killed the old Creator Revenue Sharing program, the one that paid you for impressions on your replies, and swapped in a stricter Original Content Rewards setup. Last payout went out Aug 28, earning stops Sep 7.

The new one only pays for impressions from verified and Premium users on your original posts. To qualify you need a Premium sub, 500 verified followers, and 500,000 verified timeline impressions in 90 days.

If you make any money on X, re-apply starting Sep 8 or it just stops. Reply-bait and reposting don't pay anymore. (X Help, TechCrunch)

LinkedIn is quietly throttling posts that read as AI. Their "seems like AI slop" button passed a million uses in about three weeks, and LinkedIn confirmed flagged posts get roughly 40% fewer views.

It's real people doing the flagging, and it's landing on the polished, empty stuff. If your LinkedIn content reads like a bot wrote it, you're handing away almost half your reach. Write like a person. (Fortune, The Register)

If you run Meta ads, pay attention to this one. The manual placement controls are quietly disappearing from ad sets, and the replacement can only cut a placement's bid by up to 90% instead of turning it off.

So every brand-safety or efficiency exclusion you built at the ad-set level can still serve, at about 10% of your bid. It doesn't fully block anything anymore.

Your ads can show up in spots you thought you shut off, so audit your exclusions before you assume they're holding. (PPC Land)

Bluesky tripled its video limit from 3 to 10 minutes, bumped the file cap to 300MB, and sped up uploads. Ten minutes matches TikTok's in-app limit, and the other apps on the same protocol get it too.

Long-form video there is actually usable now. If you've been testing Bluesky, your existing TikTok and Reels cuts have a home, and you're early. (TechCrunch, Engadget)

That's the five. A few more worth a look: Snapchat opened unified attribution to all advertisers, Instagram shipped a one-tap tool that roughs out a Reel for you, YouTube keeps turning itself into TV, and Digiday had a good piece on creator pricing being all over the place.

Curious what everyone's actually changing their approach on this week. And tell me what I missed, I'll add it in.

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