Social Round-Up: 11 March 2026

Welcome back to this week’s TEAM LEWIS Social Round-Up.

So what’s been happening this week in the wild world of social? Well, X is putting more content behind paywalls, Meta has decided clicks aren’t enough anymore, and Indonesia is following Australia’s lead on banning social media for under-16s. Meanwhile YouTube is bringing back direct messages, another platform for unwanted people to slide into, yay, and Meta keeps quietly turning Edits into a serious creator tool.

Let’s dive in 👇

Latest News

🧵 X introduces Exclusive Threads and new creator subscription tools

X has expanded its creator subscription features with new tools designed to help creators monetise their content. The headline update is “Exclusive Threads,” which lets creators hide parts of a thread behind a paywall. Think of it as a teaser thread where the final posts are locked unless you subscribe. And yes, they’re calling them Threads… but not that Threads. Just to keep things nice and confusing.

Alongside that, X has added clearer subscription benefit displays, shareable subscription cards and faster onboarding for creators setting up subscriptions. The broader goal is obvious. Musk wants X to become the most financially rewarding platform for creators, and if dangling big incentives gets more exclusive content flowing into the app, that’s a win for keeping users coming back. 👉 Read More

🌙 X removes its Night Mode toggle

X has quietly removed its in-app night mode control in the latest update. Instead of switching between light and dark modes within the app itself, the platform will now simply mirror whatever display setting you’ve chosen at the device level.

According to X’s head of product, the old control created unnecessary complexity and didn’t align with how most apps now manage dark mode. Some users aren’t thrilled about losing the option, but the logic is fairly straightforward. If your phone is set to dark mode, X will be too. Slightly simpler for developers. Slightly more annoying for people who liked having the choice. 👉 Read More

📊 Meta introduces “Engage-Through Attribution” for ads

Meta is changing the way advertisers measure performance on its platforms. Instead of focusing primarily on click-through attribution, Meta will now group social interactions like shares, comments, saves and likes into a new category called “engage-through attribution.”

The idea is that social doesn’t behave like search. Someone might see an ad, share it with a friend, and that friend later clicks through or searches for the brand themselves. Meta wants to capture that ripple effect more clearly. It’s also a subtle move away from Google-style attribution and toward measurement that better reflects how discovery actually happens on social. 👉 Read More

🚫 Indonesia introduces a social media ban for under-16s

Indonesia has announced it will require platforms to remove social media accounts belonging to users under 16, with the new rules coming into effect on March 28. The regulation will apply to major platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and X.

The move follows Australia’s landmark under-16 social media ban and signals a growing global trend toward stricter rules around young users online. Several other countries including Spain and Malaysia are exploring similar policies, which means age verification and youth safety are quickly becoming one of the biggest regulatory pressures facing social platforms. 👉 Read More

🎬 Meta updates Edits with new creative tools

Meta has released another round of updates for its Edits video creation app, adding new visual effects, improved caption tools and a more visual Ideas tab to help creators organise content concepts.

The Edits team is also leaning heavily on feedback from creators. Engineers are actively monitoring Threads and Instagram conversations, and even running group chats with power users to shape new features. The result is an app that’s evolving quickly and quietly becoming a very handy tool for short-form video creation. 👉 Read More

📩 YouTube direct messaging expands to more regions

YouTube has started rolling out its revived direct messaging feature to more than two dozen additional countries across Europe. The feature was previously limited to Poland and Ireland but is now expanding significantly.

It’s a simple update that lets users share videos directly with friends inside the app. With Shorts, comments, community posts and now messaging, YouTube is steadily layering more social features into the platform, which could make it feel less like a video library and more like a social network. 👉 Read More

🔧 Quick Tip of the Week

If you haven’t played around with Meta’s Edits app yet, it’s worth a test drive. The new caption highlights and effects make it really easy to add emphasis and polish to short-form videos. Even if you edit elsewhere, it’s a handy little tool for experimenting with ideas quickly.

✨ Campaigns We Love ✨

🇳🇴 Norwegian Consumer Council spoofs ‘enshittification’

A brilliantly dark campaign poking fun at how digital platforms slowly get worse once they’ve locked everyone in. It’s funny, painfully relatable and a reminder that users definitely notice when platforms start squeezing the experience. 👉 See the chaos unfold

🍟 McDonald’s turns fans’ camera rolls into a campaign

McDonald’s spotted a late-night pattern in people’s camera rolls. Nights out end, photos get blurry… and the final stop is usually McDonald’s. So they turned those real photos into the campaign. 👉 Take a late-night scroll

🗓️ Mark Your Calendars

Opportunities to celebrate this week

Wednesday March 11 – World Plumbing Day 🔧
Thursday March 12 – World Glaucoma Day 👁️
Friday March 13 – World Sleep Day 😴
Saturday March 14 – International Day of Mathematics ➗
Sunday March 15 – World Speech Day 🎤
Monday March 16 – National Panda Day 🐼
Tuesday March 17 – National Corned Beef and Cabbage Day 🥬

And next…

Wednesday March 18 – National Sloppy Joe Day 🍔
Thursday March 19 – Absolutely Incredible Kid Day 🌟
Friday March 20 – Red Nose Day 🔴
Saturday March 21 – World Down Syndrome Day 💛
Sunday March 22 – International Day of the Seal 🦭
Monday March 23 – World Meteorological Day 🌦️
Tuesday March 24 – National Cocktail Day 🍸
Wednesday March 25 – International Waffle Day 🧇

That’s a wrap for this week!

Please get in touch if you want to chat about any of these updates, or show us your camera roll and how regularly you end up in Maccas. We’re here for that.

I’ll be over here writing a long-form thread on X about the removal of night mode and then resharing it to Threads so it becomes a thread thread. It’s like inception.
See you next week, bye 👋