After the UK announced it would ban social media for under-16s, it seems the social media companies have put a halt on releasing any new features. Or, in the case of Meta, they put a halt on announcing any new apps.

However, with Cannes Lions (the big ol’ marketing festival in France) starting this week, I bet we will get a whole bunch of announcements rolling out daily.

Until that happens, though, here are the top social media bits you need to know about this week!

Creally is the AI platform for creator partnerships. AI agents handle discovery, outreach, follow-ups, and negotiations end-to-end, so your team closes more deals without the chaos. One client scaled from 200 to 5,000 monthly outreaches. Same team. Zero new hires.

In case you missed the memo, Cannes Lions started yesterday, and it seems like it gets bigger and bigger each year. 

Cannes Lions is one of the biggest advertising events in the world. Previously, it was where big brands and advertisers would meet up each year, talk shop, and figure out how they were going to allocate their budget for the year to come. 

However, in the past few years, things have deeeeeefinitely shifted. The festival that was once just for agency executives and CMOs is now shifting focus to content creators. With 2026 being the biggest shift of all. Dun dun dun. 

Brands and creators are rubbing shoulders, and over 500 YouTube creators are expected to show face this year (!!). The creator program at Cannes Lions, Lions Creators (clever name), is now running the full five days and will even have its own dedicated beach for content creators to network with large brands. 

Well, for one thing, if you work in social media and marketing, Cannes Lions impacts the rest of the industry. Meta exclusively announced new creator tools at the festival, LinkedIn has been dropping exclusives (like the ability to collaborate with others on posts!), plus there will be extensive talks around AI’s influence in marketing (by the biggest names in the biz), expanding vertical dramas (microdramas, if you will) as a format, and how brands predict they will work with creators for the coming year. 

It’s a big one to watch this week. 

With more and more apps giving users the ability to tell algorithms whether or not they like content shown to them, it seems the future of social media could be users having more control over their feeds. 

When they launched, Mastodon and Bluesky immediately allowed users to be able to customize their feeds. Now it seems as if the other apps are starting to catch on: Users want to control what they see on their feeds, not have apps tell them what they want.

Could this be the future of social media? It definitely seems possible.

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Until next week!

Mackenzie