Most Americans support a social media ban for kids

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are winning in extra time:

 META: $7.40 | ↗️ TIKTOK: $2.65 | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $5.61

In this week’s edition: 

• 🤝 Google’s “Open Call” connects brands with YouTube creators

•  Meta rolls out AI disclosure for ads… ♾️

• 🧠 …and Gen-AI ads are coming to ChatGPT

But first…

⛔ Most Americans support a social media band for kids under 16

In a new survey, Pew Research interviewed more than 9,000 U.S. adults to get their perspectives on potential social-media restrictions and gauge their support for implementation. The survey found that 56% of respondents would support a ban to prevent anyone younger than 16 from using social media.

Across the country, opinion is turning into policy. Nearly 1500 school districts have sued Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, alleging that a generation of social media usage by young people has negatively impacted their mental health. That includes Boston, where Mayor Michelle Wu joined the suit last week on behalf of the city’s 46,000 public school students. Boston’s press release claims that social media companies “have evidence of the harm they are causing to our kids by designing platforms that keep them hooked in endless scrolling…at the expense of their mental health.” A study by the Boston Public Health Commission found the number of students reporting persistent sadness rose to 44% in 2021, up from 27% in 2015. 

Meanwhile, a recent study from the Cybersafety Research Center found that most child safety features do not live up to the promises that Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube make about the protection they provide. Of the 86 features they tested, 51 (59%) failed.

A spokesperson for Meta told the Boston Globe that the company has a “longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” and that it has “listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and we’re always working to do better.” Google told the paper that “providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work.”

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta is rolling out updated disclosure labels for Facebook and Instagram ads that include AI-generated content, giving users more transparency into how ads are created.

• Ads that are created or significantly edited using Meta's AI features (such as Background Generation, Image Generation, or Add Animation) will automatically receive an AI disclosure in the "About this ad" section. Meta will also apply these labels to ads made with third-party AI tools like Photoshop or DALL·E when it detects industry-standard metadata.

• The update is intended to improve transparency around AI-generated advertising and help users better identify heavily edited content as AI tools become more widely used by advertisers.

💬 Meta revealed an auto-generated bilingual captions feature on its Edits video editing app, which includes text in 15 languages.

• This will help creators expand to new markets and is a step towards giving international content creators more exposure opportunities.

🎞️ Meta is adding new template creation tools on Edits, including more support for overlays and the ability to lock clips, keeping your clips in place so they can easily carry over for anyone who reuses your template.

🎯 Reach Planner (formerly Campaign Planner) is rolling out a redesigned experience that significantly streamlines the planning process, enabling 50% faster scenario building.

• Key upgrades include a hierarchical plan view for better navigation, enhanced side-by-side comparison, new target frequency and percent reach metrics, and one-click activation directly into Ads Manager.

• We’re told the update is rolling out to a subset of users and will scale to general availability in the coming weeks.

🚨 Buyer Beware: According to our Meta Amazon reps, age and gender targeting is moving to the ad level and will be able to reach users beyond the selected audience parameters.

🔎 🔎 Google is alpha testing Open Call, a feature in the YouTube Creator Partnerships tab that connects advertisers with hundreds of creators based on the advertiser’s brief or RFP. Advertisers can create an “Open Call” project detailing their UGC content requests, which is sent directly to creators in YouTube Studio. Creators then create and submit content to be amplified with creator partnerships boost.

🧠 Google is testing AI-generated summaries beneath Search ads, which has some folks nervous about messaging accuracy, brand control, and CTR performance. Google described the project to SearchEngineLand as “a small experiment to see if adding AI-generated context to Search ads helps people make more informed decisions.” Here’s what that looks like in the wild:

🎠YouTube confirmed that eligible creators can post carousel updates with music backing, and these posts are also eligible to be shown in the Shorts feed. Creators will also be able to add text overlays to their carousels.

📊 Social and Video creators can now track how their posts perform in Google Search, News, and Discovery. Google Search Console has added Platform Properties, which allow creators to track how their posts from Instagram, TikTok X, and YouTube appear in Google results without needing a website.

• This allows creators to track how search terms lead people back to their content and accounts without needing a website of their own. Available data will be clicks, impressions, average click-through rate, and average position.

• This update comes almost a year after Instagram posts became eligible to appear in Google Search results. Better late than never?

🗨️ YouTube has added AI-powered comment filtering in YouTube Studio. This tool makes it easier for channel managers to find and moderate comments by broader meaning, subject, or sentiment rather than relying solely on specific keywords. A “Search” filter will now be on the Comments page and the old exact-match search is now relabeled as “Keywords”

⏰ TikTok has made Multiple Location Selection available on TikTok Ads Manager. This feature is specifically for Lead Gen campaigns and lets you use Instant Forms, Website Forms, and/or Direct Message lead journeys within a single campaign. TikTok’s ads system automatically serves each user with the lead journey that’s most likely to convert. According to TikTok, advertisers using this setup achieved up to 2.3x more leads and 1.6x lower cost per lead.

TikTok has launched its Discover America Tour, a six-city U.S. roadshow designed to help creators and businesses grow on the platform while celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

• People can attend the events in person or follow along in the app through the Discover America website, which features local creators and highlights TikTok activity in each city.

• For marketers, the activations offer city-specific insights, including audience reach, trending searches, regional interests, and data on how users are turning to TikTok to learn new skills.

🔊 Spotify Ad Exchange has expanded its integration with Amazon DSP. The two platforms first connected in 2025, allowing advertisers to reach Spotify listeners across only their music and video inventory, while this new expansion allows advertisers to buy Spotify’s podcast inventory directly in ADSP. Spotify has also broadened how advertisers can buy their inventory, which was previously limited to PMP. While podcast inventory will be limited at this time to PMPs, audio and video can now be bought through Programmatic Guarantees on music inventory, with video ads also available through Open Auction.

👽 Reddit Split Testing is now in GA globally for Awareness/Reach, Traffic, Conversions, Shopping, App Installs, or Video Views objectives. Subject to minimum buys, it offers pre-built templates for common tests like:

• Reddit Max vs. Standard

• Automated Targeting vs. Manual

• CBO vs. Manual Budget

• Creative A vs. Creative B

📍 Redditor Highlights are also now generally available. Formerly known as Conversation Summary Add-Ons, the feature dynamically adds a summary and carousel of relevant user posts below eligible ad creative, helping advertisers build trust with authentic community proof.

🚀 Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) is now in public beta for new conversion campaigns, allowing us to set one campaign-level budget and bidding strategy while Reddit dynamically allocates spend across ad groups. According to Reddit, early testing shows a ~5-8% improvement in CPA and ~5% lift in conversion volume.

👀 Reddit’s 15-second engaged view optimization is now in private beta.

🤖 How clever is this? Reddit is using AI to beat AI. A new feature helps identify comments and posts that were purposefully planted on Reddit in hopes that they get pulled by AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini and shared as genuine human opinions. This week, Reddit announced that their improved systems caught 25,000 spam posts and comments per day during the first quarter.

💼 LinkedIn is rolling out a suite of AI-powered creative tools designed to simplify ad creation and campaign set up, including features highlighted in Media Happenings last December during closed testing.

• Brand Kit: Stores colors, fonts, logo, tone of voice, and key messages for easy reference in future AI generations.

• Draft with AI: Generates ad copy and creative based on a URL, campaign goal, and other context such as past high-performing creatives.

• Ads Personalization: Tailors messaging using professional attributes including job title, company, and industry for improved ad relevance.

• AI Ad Variants: Creates multiple versions of an existing ad with new headlines and text to easily test different messaging.

• Flexible Ad Creation: Automatically mix and match images, videos, and copy while optimizing ad delivery to the top performing inputs.

🧠 ChatGPT has introduced audience lists to its ad platform. This new feature lives under the “Tools” section of ads manager; however, there are no insights yet as to how audience lists impact campaign performance.

👉 Another new feature hitting the platform: using AI to generate ads. While AI-generated ad copy and creative is a standard feature across most ads managers these days, the fact that this ability has been introduced inside an AI platform is very… well, Meta.

📌 Pinterest has launched a new markets view element within its ads platform to give advertisers clearer insights into the performance of Pinterest campaigns across different global markets.

• It gives a simplified overview of market-specific data to help guide budgeting decisions.

• The tool lets advertisers easily add new markets, turn on auto-translation for titles and descriptions, and activate currency conversion to help scale reach across borders.

• Coming soon to all ad partners.

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

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This week’s edition of the Thread was created by Jess Dashner, Anoushka Madan, Mariya Samardzhieva, Sabina Saktaganova, Sims Wilson, Kiara Quigley, Lara Spijkerman, Kayleigh McDonald, Caitlin LaValle, and Carly Carioli.