Social Media Industry Round-Up #91: Meta Is Breaking GDPR Rules, Gen Z Are Driving Fan Culture & TikTok Copyright Notices Are Up YoY

Every week, the Marketing team at The Social Shepherd puts together all the relevant industry updates in a round-up newsletter.

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Is Meta Breaking GDPR Rules & Other Social Media News. 

Listen to Zoe, our CEO, discuss all of the marketing updates of the week, the advertising industry then vs now, Glastonbury social media trends and more… 👀

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Meta’s Ad-Free Subscription Violates the DMA.

The EU Commission has ruled that Meta’s ad-free subscription (launched in October 2023 for people in the EU, EEA and Switzerland) fails to comply with the DMA (Digital Markets Act). This act aims to give European social media users more control over how social platforms log and use their personal data. 

However, data campaigners claim that asking users to pay for privacy goes against GDPR rules and encourages ‘data capitalism’. Hence, the European Data Protection Board issued a call for an investigation into the offering. 

This breach of the DMA could result in Meta being fined up to 10% of their total worldwide turnover. 

Sends Are a Key Focus. 

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, has reiterated the importance of sends as a metric to evaluate success on the platform, as the algorithm prioritises content that’s been highly shared. 

Meta Switches AI Labels. 

Meta has slightly tweaked their ‘Made with AI’ labels to ‘AI info’ to clarify users' confusion about the content. 

These ‘AI info’ labels include a note with more specificity on how the content has been altered or any AI tools used.

Gen Z Prefer Fan-Made Content. 

YouTube has released its annual ‘Culture & Trends Report’, highlighting how fan culture is turning Gen Z into video content creators. 

Fan culture has become ‘the central driver of emerging popular culture’ as the volume of fan-made content has increased and can be more popular than its source content. 

According to the Washington Post, 60% of Gen Z Americans say they often spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than watching the thing itself. Fans also expect their media to be malleable and to be empowered to remix it.

Picture-In-Picture Viewing for Shorts.

To make it easier to watch Shorts, YouTube is testing picture-in-picture so users can navigate their phones while watching video clips. This feature is only available for Premium subscribers on Android so far. 

Copyright Notices Up in 2023 & Success Rate Down. 

TikTok's latest transparency report (released every six months) reveals copyright complaints on a steep upward trend during 2023 and a shockingly low success rate of notices that result in takedowns.

Complaints are up 447.069% YoY, but successes are only up 277.647%YoY.

TikTok Book Awards (UK & Ireland). 

Any #booktok fans out there? 

The book awards shortlist for 2024 has been announced! TikTok’s community of book lovers has reached over 35 million posts on the platform, helping authors, publishers and independent bookshops thrive in the digital age. 

The TikTok Shop Book of Year winner will be decided based on TikTok Shop sales data and the book's impact on TikTok.

Genie AI Chatbot. 

TikTok has attempted to trademark the name “Genie” for its AI chatbot. This new tool would enable users to pose questions in-stream and get immediate responses, among other functions. 

TikTok said: ‘Genie will simulate conversations, facilitate interaction and communication between humans and AI, and produce human-like speech and text.’

Downloading Clips Without Watermark.

TikTok has finally updated its ‘save TikTok’ function, allowing creators to download content without a watermark. This makes it easier to repurpose the content and cross-post it to other platforms.