TOGETHER WITH

It’s Tuesday and Meta is (allegedly) putting its rivals to the test. The company reportedly recruited hundreds of contractors to pose as kids while asking chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT about high-risk topics.

Today’s News

🤝 IShowSpeeds teams up with Expedia
🎤 An Indian musical icon goes viral
🛠️ Instagram lets users tweak the algo
⚽ AI athletes blow up on Shorts
🎙️ Last week on Creator Upload…

THE BIZ

Speed is going global (and you can too!).

Expedia’s new campaign wants people to travel Speed-style

The globetrotter: IShowSpeed is the star of Expedia’s newest campaign, an ad called Travel Like Speed that was made to tell young, internet-savvy travelers about the platform’s offerings outside of flights and hotels.

This isn’t the start of Speed’s relationship with Expedia—nor, of course, the first time he’s expressed interest in travel. In 2025, he ran Speed Does America and Speed Does Africa, two separate monthlong tours where he streamed 24/7. Then, this past April, Speed kicked things off with Expedia, visiting five Caribbean countries during a single branded 15-hour livestream. That stream resulted in a “sharp surge” in search traffic for places the creator visited, Expedia tells Tubefilter.

The ad: With that in mind, Expedia decided to go bigger. The Travel Like Speed YouTube ad follows Speed on adventures across the U.S. and links out to Exspeedia.com, a dedicated map that shows global destinations and activities Speed’s experienced. Tap on a locale, and you’ll see photos of Speed at the site along with recommendations for travelers who want to follow in his footsteps.

The data: Expedia says it’s seen “a clear shift toward experience-driven travel, particularly among younger travelers.” Its Unpack ’26 report showed that 57% of travelers say they’re likely to attend a local sporting or cultural experience while on a trip. That number jumps to 68% if you’re just looking at Gen Z and Millennials.

Expedia has spent years advertising its hotel and flight booking, but travelers are increasingly looking for ways to buy experiences. TikTok has become a major ‘what to do in X city’ search engine for Gen Zers who take inspiration from others’ videos, and Airbnb is actively partnering with creators to curate bookable experiences.

Having Speed on its side gives Expedia a leg up in the ever-growing travel market—especially when it’s also offering a chance to meet him.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

Kumar Sanu is climbing the YouTube charts.

Kumar Sanu’s decades-long career as a playback singer has made him a Bollywood legend. Now, he’s climbing the YouTube charts—with 650,000 new subscribers added in the last week alone. (Tubefilter)
A recent study from researchers at New York University and Northeastern found that child safety features on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube failed at least 50% of the time. (Engadget)
Comcast has announced a split that will make NBCUniversal a standalone company encompassing NBC, Peacock, Bravo, Telemundo, the NBCU film and TV studios, Universal theme parks, and Sky. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Amid a crackdown on AI content, music streaming service Tidal says it will no longer “knowingly attribute royalties to music we identify as wholly AI-generated." (Engadget)

TAG, YOU’RE IT

Instagram is breaking out the tags. (Photo illustration by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.)

Instagram is inviting users to tweak the algorithm with categorical tags

The algo controls: Instagram is putting users in the driver’s seat. The platform’s head, Adam Mosseri, has announced new controls for Your Algorithm, the six-month-old product that employs AI to bring more user choice to the Instagram Reels feed.

As Mosseri explained in a recent post, the platform is adding “quick signals” to the Reels UI in order to make the Your Algorithm tool “feel more present and useful.”

Those quick signals take the form of buttons that name content categories like “sports,” “studying hacks,” and “day in the life.” By swiping down on the main Instagram feed, viewers can access the signals and choose the ones they’d like to see more often.

Users can also combine those signals with text-based inputs that tune the Instagram Reels recommendation algorithm.

“Over time, we want your algorithm to feel like something you talk to rather than something that happens to you.”

- Adam Mosseri, Instagram Head

The context: Instagram’s decision to level up Your Algorithm reflects a larger trend within the industry. Governmental forces, especially in the European Union, have required platforms to include opt-out clauses for users who don’t want personalized recommendations. And as lawsuits accuse social platforms of knowingly developing addictive algorithms, choice-based feeds may soon become a legal necessity.

Those shifting tides have encouraged tech companies to add more choice to algorithmic feeds, resulting in the debut of TikTok’s For You Page topic sliders, YouTube’s promptable feed, and X’s conversational algorithm. With Your Algorithm, Instagram is the latest platform to double down on user agency.

GLOBAL TOP 50 • VIEWS

Pro athletes are getting the AI treatment.

On YouTube, World Cup AI content is just as sloppy as you’d expect

The AI skits: AI spares no man—especially when the man in question is a World Cup athlete.

Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland know that fact all too well. As the star players for two of Europe’s biggest clubs, the leaders of their respective national teams, and the recipients of two of the biggest contracts in soccer history, Mbappé and Haaland are fierce rivals.

That is, unless you happen to see them canoodling on YouTube Shorts. There, deepfaked versions of the two soccer pros share sweets, blow bubbles, and pull pranks on Ronaldo.

By turning the stars of the 2026 World Cup into uncanny AI-generated characters, the channel Mischief Time has merged slop with soccer videos to unite two massive buckets of Shorts content. And, despite YouTube’s ongoing war against deepfakes (including the global rollout of its likeness detection tools), that combination is taking off. Mischief Time finished at #30 in our latest Global Top 50 ranking by bringing in 405.4 million weekly views.

June is proving to be a major month for Mischief Time. Data from Gospel Stats.

The context: That success might be derivative, but it’s not surprising. YouTube routinely turns athletes across the sports world into short-form superstars, and the World Cup has only intensified demand for that content.

Thanks to the ongoing tourney, channels based around the beautiful game are getting more weekly views than they’ve received at any point this year. It was only a matter of time before AI channels began tapping into that hype.

WATCH THIS 👀

Creator Upload is exploring the ins and outs of Cannes Lions.

Last week on the podcast…

The episode: On the latest installment of Creator Upload, hosts Joshua Cohen and Lauren Schnipper headed to Cannes, France, for the 73rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Tune in to learn more about the festival, discover why brands like PepsiCo are shifting resources to influencer management, and find out how Facebook’s reimagined Creator Studio is using AI to separate business and creator tools.

It’s all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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