Hello, geeks!

Go f**k yourself!... No wait, that’s Elon’s line. Welcome to this week’s Geekout! 😁

Before we get started… You need to watch the Elon “Go F**k Yourself’ remix. Sing-a-long if you know it! 🎤🎶💀

I could spend the next couple of minutes wasting more time ranting about Elmo’s latest batshit crazy antics. But I'm guessing we’ve all read more than enough about X’s tech clown this week. 🤡

All i will say is good luck, Linda. Your boss just turned your job from being insanely hard, to pretty much impossible. 💀

BECAUSE “I’M WORTH IT!”… 

I have had a wild week myself (not Elon-level wild). I was invited to speak at L’Oreal’s Medfluencers event in London (photos here), alongside the always lovely Sophie ‘Pretty Little Marketer’ Miller. Scored major dad points with my teen daughter for bringing home lots of free products. 💄

FAMOUS FOR 5 MINUTES… 

I was back in London again filming for a new Channel 5 documentary (BTS photos here). I can’t reveal further details due to an NDA. But it will be broadcast in January 2024. You’ll find me cringing behind a sofa somewhere when it airs. 🫣

YOU’ll LOVE THIS… Trust me, this tool will save you hours when creating your end of year social media reports. Try it for FREE. 👇

Create Social Media Reports your Boss Will Actually Read

It’s that time of year again for everyone's least favourite pre-holiday season tradition... monthly reports! 🎄😭

But if you have Measure Studio you don’t have to spend ALL day putting them together.

Check out Measure Studio, an analytics tool that helps you build slick social media reports, in minutes.

With just a few clicks...

• Consolidate all accounts, platforms, and data in one place 📈

• Create professional, branded reports instantly🔥

• Easily highlight one account, platform, even a single post’s metrics 📊

And Geekout readers can try it for FREE for 2 weeks. Nice! 👌

.

🔥 GEEKOUT HOT 5

Geekout with our hottest picks of the week:

1. Elon Musk Told Advertisers To Go F**k Themselves [GOOD LUCK, LINDA]  

2. X May Lose Up To $75 Million In Revenue As More Advertisers Pull Out [X-ITING]

3. Meta Knew About Huge Underage User Problem, Court Docs Revealed [TROUBLING]

4. Threads To Launch In Europe In December With Limited Posting Option [GROWING]

5. US Judge Blocked State of Montana’s TikTok Ban [SURVIVING]

Unlock Social Media Secrets for 2024 🗝️

Mindvalley, the online learning platform with 10 million students worldwide, is bringing you the secrets of digital influence in 2024.

Check out the Mindvalley Social Media Summit 2023 featuring top social media industry pioneers on Dec 8-10.

You’ll learn how to...

• Craft viral content with global reach 🌍

• Leverage AI for creative content breakthroughs 🤖

• Build a magnetic personal brand online ✨

• Transform followers into a thriving customer base 📈 

…And more.

And the best bit? It’s a 100% FREE event.

A must-attend event for social media managers, marketers, and digital creators gearing up for 2024.

.

🚨 EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT…

Elon’s gone f**ked himself

This. Is. Not. Normal. In fact it’s just so stupid that I feel like I shouldn’t be writing about it, except perhaps in some wild fever dream.

Let’s recap: Elon Musk started the week with a trip to Israel, designed to show the world that he wasn’t antisemitic, despite what his recent, revenue-destroying post might have indicated.

The apparent contrition continued later in the week at the New York Times’ DealBook summit, where he said the antisemitic post was a “mistake”

"I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic. And for that I’m quite sorry, that was not my intention,” he said.

He added it was “One of the most foolish — if not the most foolish — thing I’ve done on the platform.”

But almost immediately afterwards, in front of Disney CEO Bob Iger, who had earlier explained that associating with antisemitism wasn’t in his company’s marketing playbook, he straight-out told advertisers to “go f**k themselves”. Very much without the asterisks.

Musk seems to believe the people of Earth will judge the advertisers and rise up against them when X dies. They’re more likely to just shrug and move on. It doesn’t matter to the world anywhere nearly as much as he thinks it does - partly because of what he’s done to it in the past year.

No wonder major advertisers say they aren’t coming back. Some brands are ditching the platform altogether. Musk’s revival of 2010s alt-right conspiracy theory Pizzagate (literally on his way back from Israel!) can’t have helped.

Some wonder if he’s crafting a narrative around why X’s eventual demise won’t be his fault. But maybe it’s just that he’s so extremely, terminally online that his critical thinking has melted away.

And if you think “CEO” Linda Yaccarino might take this opportunity to finally leap off the sinking ship,… No, it seems she’s now deeply aligned with Musk.

She defended his rant in public, and even internally to staff as a rallying cry. If she doesn’t get fired, it looks like she’ll be going down with this ship.

No more pretending they can’t see the kids

Let’s face it, we all know that there are plenty of under-13s on social media when they shouldn’t be.

But a newly unsealed lawsuit from 33 US state attorneys general looks set to be a major headache for Meta as this ‘open secret’ gets shone in a harsh light.

The lawsuit alleges that Meta has knowingly done nothing about millions of underage users.

It makes other claims too, like that Mark Zuckerberg vetoed a plastic surgery filter ban despite concerns for teens among staff.

Meta, and other social media companies, have for the most part done the bare minimum to police the use of their platforms by young users. This lawsuit, along with new legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Act, means they’re going to have to take the issue a lot more seriously in 2024.

Also this week, the father of Molly Russell (the UK teenager who took her own life after viewing harmful social media posts) has called for an end to algorithms 'pushing out harmful content', six years after her death. Six years!

Oh, and the Reels algorithm appears to do some dodgy things in the child safety space too,.

Meanwhile, it was announced that the CEOs of Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, and Discord will testify before the US Senate on child safety early next year, showing that this issue is not going away.

.

✨ NEW & NOTEWORTHY

Everything else you need to know from the past seven days…

.

😆 LOL

Check out what happened when A.I. turned these memes into videos. 😳

TLDR: They look terrible

Also:

• This fake Instagram feature could be a real timesaver!

.

🪧 BRANDS

The North Face earned itself some brand social Brownie points this week when it delivered a new waterproof coat to an influencer up a mountain. A set-up or just great reactive marketing? It worked either way.

Digital Brand Bites has the details…

The ‘sassy brand voice’ is overdone, but Channel 4 is really doing it well on Threads with a pitch-perfect understanding of the platform. This is a good one too.

.

📈 MEMES

Daniel Craig is already a regular Friday afternoon meme, but now he’s being used as a comparison scale…

.

🤯 WHAT DID YOU SAY?!

“A gigantic global sewer”

– The mayor of Paris didn’t mince her words when describing X and why she’s quitting the platform.

.

👀 MY FAV READS

This is by far the biggest gradual shift in social media over the past few years, and it’s neatly summarised here:

.

🛠️ NEW TOOL

YouTube’s war on ad-blockers will no doubt continue as the ad-haters fight back:

.

📉 Trending down

Social media apps that use growth hacks to top the App Store always end up flopping.

Life is tough for small social media startups, but trying to shortcut your way to mass scale clearly doesn’t work.

Latest case in point? Lapse, with its spammy forced invites system.

.

😮 WTF?!

“Aitana López is a Spanish AI model and influencer with 124,000 followers on Instagram, who was apparently created to save a Barcelona-based agency from dealing with tiresome real influencers.

Also:

• China tried to keep kids off social media. Now the elderly are hooked

• No surprise. The influencer who ‘tattooed her boyfriend’s name on her head’… didn’t really.

.

🤦 FAIL

File this under ‘you had one job’… Meta’s battery strap for the Quest 3 has a fault that renders the battery useless… it’s a charger that sometimes doesn’t charge, so shipments have been paused.

Hopefully they can get this sorted soon.

.

🔍 NEW RESEARCH

“A study of more than 2 million people’s internet use found no “smoking gun” for widespread harm to mental health from online activities, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety…

“However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more co-operation from tech companies”

.

🪦 RIP

Social media features heading for the graveyard:

Tumblr is killing its Post Plus subscriptions feature from January 2024. Parent company Automattic recently said it was putting Tumblr into a low-priority maintenance mode where only bugfixes and user safety would be prioritisied.

.

🤖 SOCIAL A.I.

All the ways A.I. is transforming social media:

Snapchat keeps pushing out new A.I. features, and this one looks fun:

• LinkedIn is using A.I. to better detect rule-breaking content

• Snapchat+ is introducing a new feature called ‘Upgrade My AI’

• Microsoft Paint(!): Okay it’s not social media, but it’s fun to see that 90s relic Microsoft Paint now has an AI image generator built in

.

📊 SOCIAL STATS

50%

…the amount of time TikTok says users are now spending watching videos longer that 1 minute.

What’s more… over the past 6 months, creators who post videos 1 minute or longer have a 5x growth rate in followers of those who post only short videos.

Shortform video isn’t so short anymore.

Also:

• X is down by 2.9 million users in the UK over the past year. Meta apps had smaller drops, but TikTok is up by 4.6 million

.

📈 CHARTED

Interest in TikTok shopping in the U.S continues to rise.

Chart via Chartr

Also:

• 50 most visited A.I. tools and their 24B+ traffic behaviour

.

• …and Europe's largest consumer group has filed a similar complaint. [Reuters $$$]

• Meta’s Q3 threats report shows risk of Chinese influence ahead of election. [CNBC]

• Facebook’s subscriptions feature could be beneficial to publishers. [Press Gazette]

• Meta has closed nearly 4,800 fake accounts in China that tried to polarise US voters. [The Guardian]

• Don’t expect a price cut for the Quest 3 any time soon. [Upload VR]

Insights to give you an edge at work:

• 11 Instagram trends social media managers should track in 2024. [Hootsuite blog]

• Instagram Story Analytics: How to measure the metrics that matter. [Hootsuite blog]

• Meta has published a new guide on how to maximise post-holiday promotions. [Social Media Today]

New features and tests:

WhatsApp:

• WhatsApp's desktop apps are getting back the view-once media option. [Android Police]

.

.

• TikTok will hold an ‘Openhouse’ AR showcase event on 12 December. [Social Media Today]

New features and tests:

• TikTok is rolling out a live voice chat feature to more users. [@jonahmanzano]

.

💥 EVEN MORE SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS & UPDATES

• Discord has expanded access to its online shop. [TechCrunch]

• Most online hate targets women, according to a new EU report. [Reuters $$$]

• UK school pupils are using AI to create indecent imagery of other children, a pressure group has claimed. [The Guardian]

• The UK government’s technology secretary has attacked the ‘despicable’ failure of social media firms to police harmful content. [The Guardian]

• Telegram’s bans on extremist channels don’t seem to work. [Wired $$$]

• UK will launch an Online Fraud Charter with 11 major tech companies including TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. [Sky News]

• France's prime minister asked her cabinet to stop using apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram and opt for French startup Olvid instead. [Reuters $$$]

• India has warned Meta and YouTube to enforce rules to deter deepfakes. [Reuters $$$]

Insights to give you an edge at work:

• What happens when A.I. plans your entire social strategy? [Hootsuite blog]

• YouTube has published a deep dive on the world’s fascination with unboxing videos. [YouTube Official Blog]

• Reddit has added a new ‘Creative’ certification to its Reddit Ads Formula marketing education platform. [Social Media Today]

New features and tests:

• YouTube is showing recommendations when logged out or with watch history off again. [9to5Google]

• LinkedIn has expanded its ID Verification to more countries. [Social Media Today]

• LinkedIn has added new tools to help healthcare workers find the right job. [Social Media Today]

• LinkedIn has announced new adtech, including a new Conversions API, improved website actions tracking, and updates for Document Ads. [Social Media Today]

• Pinterest has expanded direct links to more ad campaign types. [Social Media Today]

.

📰 WEEKEND READS

• The war in Gaza is reshaping moderation rules

• Slick videos or more 'authentic' content? The Israel-Gaza battles raging on TikTok and X

• Is Drake really the master of his own memes?

• How your child’s online mistake can ruin your digital life

• People get their news from TikTok. This doesn’t mean we’re screwed

.

😳 AND FINALLY…

Want a new job that will probably be rendered unnecessary pretty soon? “Welcome to the world of prompt engineering, where you’re paid to get the best answers from AI.”

.

📅 BACK NEXT WEEK…

… And that’s your geeky social media news download… Done! ✅

A quick bit of housekeeping… 🎄🎅🏻

• Geekout will be taking its annual Christmas holiday later this month.

• The final edition of Geekout for 2023 will be on Friday 22nd December.

• There will be NO Geekout on Friday 29th December AND Friday 5th January 2024

• Geekout will return on Friday 12th January 2024.

Right… I’m heading off to check if Elon has told anyone else to get f**ked.

Goodbye geeks!

p.s. This newsletter is edited by Martin SFP Bryant