Social’s evolving USP Regulation, clipping campaigns and AI reshaping the platform experience

This report examines the growing impact of regulations, clipping campaigns, and AI content saturation on social platforms and marketing strategy. It explains the direct impacts of these new challenges on audience behaviour, and outlines how platform and broader marketing stakeholders can adapt to avoid the resulting loss of signal, capitalise on the new tools, and pre-empt the emerging consumer behaviours that will respond to these changes. 

This report is designed for marketing teams looking to adapt strategies in a highly saturated and less authentic social media environment increasingly constrained by social media regulation. This report will outline the main challenges and provide consumer insight to guide how best to lean into the opportunities, and a roadmap for what to expect next. 

Key data and insights in this report:

• Reasons for using social media that are most important to consumers
• Advertisement preferences
• Consumer behaviours on reducing screen time
• Reasons and motivations for consumer use of analogue devices
• Weekly and daily use of social media platforms
• Time spent on social media use every week

Data used:

• MIDiA Research Consumer Survey Q2 2026, US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, South Korea, Brazil, n = 9,000
• MIDiA Research Consumer Survey Q1 2026, US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Spain, Poland, Japan, Colombia, n = 9,000