TLDR: Social Media Headlines – 25 September 2025

• Victoria’s Secret launches home fragrance: The collection is releasing just in time for the holiday season, as the retailer chases a growing market segment.
• Retail’s seasonal hiring could hit lowest point since 2009: Challenger, Gray & Christmas predicts that retailers will bring on fewer than 500,000 employees in Q4, a low last seen following the 2008 financial crisis.
• The American Girl doll of the year is Samantha’s great, great granddaughter: With Raquel Reyes, the company has created a descendant of another character for the first time — while introducing a new generation to its luxury product.
• Carter’s adopts ‘poison pill’ after hedge fund amasses nearly 17% of shares: The children’s apparel retailer moved to avert a hostile takeover after an investment firm disclosed its stock purchase to federal regulators.
• Google offers to reinstate YouTube accounts previously banned for COVID-19 speech ‘violations’.
• Australia’s social media ban for teens has drawn praise at the UN. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promoted his government’s world-first teen social media ban at the event, warning that the challenges posed by social media were “constantly evolving”.
• Will Smith, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones celebrate their birthdays today.
• Google Search Live is live in U.S., with voice and camera AI mode: Google Search Live lets users talk with Search and share camera views for AI-powered answers, context, and links in real time.
• Google clarifies API key process for local inventory feeds: Google simplified the process for merchants to obtain API keys for local inventory feeds, clearing a hurdle to faster Shopping integration.
• Cloudflare offers way to block AI Overviews – will Google comply?: Cloudflare’s new Content Signals limit AI use of your content via robots.txt. However, it’s unclear whether Google or others will comply.
• AI Overview citations: Why they don’t drive clicks and what to do: Data from 20,000+ queries shows AI Overviews match Position 6 results – offering high visibility, but far fewer clicks than blue links.
• People Also Ask SEO: How to optimize, rank and track: Capture long-tail traffic through People Also Ask results. See how to identify opportunities and build content that stands out.
• The origins of SEO and what they mean for GEO and AIO: The story of how SEO got its name reveals why AI-era acronyms – AIO, GEO, AEO – face the same challenges of credit, clarity, and consensus.
• Trump expected to sign a TikTok deal Thursday: President Donald Trump is expected to sign a deal today to facilitate the sale of TikTok from ByteDance to a group of American investors. ByteDance will hold less than 20% of the stock in the new company. Data from users will be stored in the US and overseen by cloud computing company Oracle. Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison, CEO of Dell Technologies Michael Dell, and the Murdoch family will play a role in the deal.
• Google and Qualcomm execs confirm Android for PC is coming: ‘I’ve seen it, it is incredible’: Google wants to bring all of its Android AI features and apps to the PC ecosystem. It appears that Android laptops will soon be a reality. Google had confirmed plans to merge ChromeOS and Android into one thing earlier this year. A recent on-stage conversation between Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Google’s head of platforms and devices Rick Osterloh at a Qualcomm event (video available in the article) further expanded on those plans.
• NASA Confirms First Crewed Mission to Orbit The Moon in 50+ Years Set For 2026: NASA is on track to send astronauts to orbit the Moon in early 2026, its first mission to do so in more than half a century. The manned mission, dubbed Artemis 2, has experienced multiple setbacks but is now scheduled for April 2026 at the latest. The crew will comprise three US and one Canadian astronaut. A video that introduces the Artemis 2 crew is available in the article.
• Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time: Doctors have treated Huntington’s disease successfully for the first time. A genetic disease, Huntington’s relentlessly kills brain cells. It resembles a combination of dementia, Parkinson’s, and motor neuron disease. The new treatment is a type of gene therapy given during 12 to 19 hours of delicate brain surgery. It will likely be very expensive, but it is considered safe. The data shows that, three years after surgery, there was an average 75% slowing of the disease.
• Hiring only senior engineers is killing companies: There is currently a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers that most companies won’t even consider. Smart companies can get a significant advantage by not fighting over seniors and hiring these juniors instead. Shopify recently hired 25 interns and is aiming for 1,000 more by the end of the year because interns bring energy, drive, and intensity, which pushes the whole team forward. While it is safer to hire someone with years of experience who can contribute from day one, the most critical factors – motivation, ambition, character, and brains – have little to do with experience.
• How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs: AWS S3 is a scalable multi-tenant storage service with APIs to store and retrieve objects. It offers extremely high availability and durability at a relatively low cost. What started as a service optimized for backups and media storage for e-commerce websites has grown into the main storage system used for analytics and machine learning on massive data lakes. The growing trend now for entire data infrastructure projects to be based on S3, which gives them the benefit of stateless nodes while outsourcing difficult durability, replication, and load-balancing problems to S3 – this reduces cloud costs.
• You Are Not Late: While it would’ve been amazing to be an entrepreneur during the dot-com boom, right now is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a time to invent something. People in the future will look back at right now and think it was a great period to start, just as we look back to the past and think they had it great, too. Today is truly a wide-open frontier.
• Some loosely organized thoughts on the current Zeitgeist – Terence Tao: The systems, incentives, and technologies in the modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual while massively empowering large organizations, at the significant expense of small organizations. The imbalanced system provides significant material comforts and some limited feeling of agency, but it has led to individuals feeling disconnected, alienated, lonely, and cynical or pessimistic about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges. Much of the current debate on societal issues is framed as conflicts between large organizations, conflicts between large organizations and average individuals, or a yearning for a return to a more traditional era.
• Y Combinator launches ‘Early Decision’ for students who want to graduate first, build later: Y Combinator’s new Early Decision application track allows students to apply while still in school and get accepted and funded immediately, with participation deferred until after they graduate.
• OpenAI Looks to Build In-House Ad Infrastructure: OpenAI has posted new job listings that indicate it is planning to build internal tools for campaign management, ad platform integration, and real-time attribution.
• ChatGPT and the Great Bundling: OpenAI released a paper last week showing that ChatGPT is being used as an all-in-one assistant across personal and work tasks.
• Libghostty Is Coming: libghostty is a zero-dependency library with an API for parsing terminal sequences and maintaining terminal state.
• AI and the FDA: AI holds a lot of promise for more effective, better-targeted drugs, but only if the FDA adapts.
• Five Years After Apple Broke Up With Intel, Intel is Begging for Money: Intel and Apple are in early discussions about how to work more closely together.
• Influencer infrastructure: UK MPs are calling for better support for YouTube and TikTok content creators. A cross-party group aims to address challenges like funding, studio access and difficulty obtaining loans or mortgages. MPs say digital creators are reshaping culture and should be recognised as key contributors to the creative economy. The initiative also seeks to ensure platforms and policymakers work together to remove barriers and provide fairer opportunities.
• If the U.S. is getting a new TikTok app, which version will the world use?
• The EU is looking at ways to deal with cookie consent pop-up overload.
• Snap’s offering incentives to boost uptake of its Sponsored Snaps.
• YouTube will now let you hide annoying End Screens.
• Miley Cyrus is the new face of Maybelline.
• Chili’s brings back the viral mozzarella-stick costume.
• OREO transforms crosswalks into shoppable cookies.
• The Gilmore Girls boyfriends star in a new Panera campaign.
• Why customers say online shopping just can’t compare to the in-store experience: Just over half of customers said they shop in person instead of online so they can try on clothing or test products, according to a Chatmeter survey.
• How to drive adoption of contact center voice AI: “Given that voice is the most popular channel, it follows that if you’re going to win big on automation, it’s by offering an excellent voice AI experience,” CMP Research’s Nicole Kyle said.
• Albertsons links grocery savings with travel bookings: The grocer added a feature to its loyalty program that lets people earn cash back when they arrange airfare, hotel stays, car rentals and vacation packages.
• Videos of Charlie Kirk’s Murder Are Still on Social Media — and That’s No Accident: Politicians demanding the removal of videos of Kirk’s killing pushed tech companies to gut the very systems they now expect to protect them.
• Courts Block Meta From Sharing Anti-ICE Activists’ Instagram Account Info With Feds: For now, Meta cannot disclose to federal investigators the identities of Instagram users who named and shamed a Border Patrol agent.
• Walmart, Target bring back October deals events: To entice consumers to shop early, the mass merchants join Amazon and others in kicking off the holiday season with sales events next month.
• Office Depot owner to go private for $1B: The ODP Corporation has agreed to be bought by an affiliate of private equity group Atlas Holdings for $28 per share in cash.
• Managing tariff impact gets tougher as the holidays approach: Lower-income households are especially worried about employment and higher prices — and prices are indeed rising.
• What consumer behavior will look like this holiday season: This holiday season will see consumers making financial trade-offs — cutting essentials to afford gifts while relying more on credit & price comparisons to navigate spending. Explore what shoppers are looking for in this Trendline.
• J.C. Penney furthers ‘It’s from where?’ campaign with exclusive Rebecca Minkoff tie-up: The affordable line from the designer, like the department store’s Bob Mackie collection, is part of an effort to appeal to budget-minded fashionistas.
• Best Buy builds retail media chops with in-store takeovers, sports deals: The retailer touted the strength of its advertising services for brand partners during its inaugural Best Buy Ads showcase.
• Walmart boosts search accuracy across languages with better translations: The retailer uses an AI agent to flag search terms, which are sent to a team of linguists who find the right meaning and add it to the company’s translation platform.
• Lululemon’s ‘downward spiral’ — and how the brand plans to break out of it: High-priced athleisure isn’t dead, but boring athleisure might be. That means it’s back to the innovation drawing board for the much-loved Canadian brand.
• Schema and AI Overviews: Does structured data improve visibility?: A head-to-head schema experiment uncovers whether well-implemented structured data gives pages an edge in Google AI Overviews.
• Google Ads streamlines scripts documentation: You can now navigate Google Ads scripts more easily with streamlined guides, a central reference tab, and consolidated sample code.
• Your GEO content audit template: Your old SEO checklist won’t cut it. A GEO content audit template helps position your brand as AI’s go-to source.
• The must-have social media tool for multi-location brands in 2026: Rallio, the latest in AI-powered social media tools, igniting online visibility.
• Google pushes Demand Gen deeper into performance marketing: Google is shifting Demand Gen from an upper-funnel discovery tool to a full-funnel performance driver, with YouTube at the center.
• LinkedIn Company Intelligence API links ads to pipeline, revenue: LinkedIn’s new API gives B2B advertisers clearer proof of ROI by tying campaign engagement directly to pipeline and revenue outcomes.
• Microsoft clarifies nonprofit ad grant program status: Microsoft’s Ads for Social Impact program offers nonprofits ad credits across Bing, MSN, Outlook, and more – but entry is waitlisted.
• Customers are more likely to subscribe when it’s easy to cancel: More than three-quarters of consumers say the ability to pause, swap or meter subscriptions is very or extremely important.
• Where companies fall short in their personalization efforts: Shoppers appreciate personalization when it helps with product discovery or deals, but about half say brands’ recommendations feel random and irrelevant, a VML survey found.
• Red Lobster deploys AI bots to answer phones: SoundHound’s voice automation technology is expected to free up workers and improve front-of-house service.
• Kellanova uses AI to predict creative performance and drive KPIs: The marketer of brands including Pringles and Pop-Tarts found that predictive impact scoring can boost creative performance and media ROI.
• Oreo transforms crosswalks into cookies to spur impulse purchases: The Mondelez brand decorated crosswalks outside of select Kroger locations to include QR codes accessing special offers on its products.
• Shake Shack appoints first chief brand officer: The addition of a marketing executive is aligned with the fast-casual chain’s plan to increase its paid media ad spend to help boost sales.
• Amazon grants marketing cloud access to any sponsored ad campaigns: With a no-code user interface, more marketers will be able to integrate their first-party data with Amazon’s shopping, browsing and streaming signals.
• TikTok’s Change Makers program aims to highlight creators looking to use the platform for good.
• Instagram becomes Meta’s third 3 billion user app.
• Instagram’s tools designed to protect teenagers from harmful content are failing to stop them from seeing suicide and self-harm posts, a study has claimed.
• How Essentia pushes past category cliches with its New York takeover: The Nestlé brand’s latest effort includes videos, out-of-home ads, experiential activations, influencer collaborations and a sports partnership.
• In this economy!? Maxwell House rebrands as Maxwell Apartment: The Kraft Heinz brand’s social-first campaign nods to the historically tough housing market by offering a 12-month “lease” on coffee for less than $40.
• Global ad spend to rise faster than expected amid digital boom: WARC – A “pre-tariff windfall” of activity and burst of spending on social platforms led to a surprise upward revision of the researcher’s 2025 forecasts.
• How Kellanova uses AI to predict creative performance and drive KPIs: The marketer of brands including Pringles and Pop-Tarts found that predictive impact scoring can boost creative performance and media ROI.

Contributions from one or more of the following:

• MyZA News
• MyPR Press Releases
• The Guardian
• Daily Maverick
• Formula 1
• Bloomberg
• Daily Investor
• Search Engine Land
• The Daily Aus
• Top Auto
• My Broadband
• 1440
• The Epoch Times
• TLDR
• The Know Daily
• The Daily Carnage
• Reuters
• LA Times
• CX Dive
• Social Media Eaxminer
• Daily Dive
• Cricket Times
• Sail World
• SA Rugby Magazine
• Al Jazeera
• ABC News

Do you have an RSS Feed? Want us to feature YOUR headlines? Please contact MyZA HERE with a link to your RSS Feed. Each headline is manually picked and placed – no AI, no Bots. Just sweat, tears and human bias.