Millennials and Generation Z spend a disproportionate amount of time on social media, swiping left, right, up, and down, making growth in interactions an increasingly important measure of brand relevance. For restaurant chains seeking to attract younger consumers, social media platforms have become critical advertising tools for building brand awareness and, ultimately, converting that attention into restaurant visits or online orders through viral campaigns.
In a review of which U.S. restaurant chains won over younger generations in the second-quarter social media wars, UBS equity research analyst Dennis Geiger, who specializes in the U.S. restaurant industry, said McDonald's, Starbucks, and KFC dominated restaurant engagement on Instagram, while Wendy's, Chipotle, and several casual-dining chains recorded some of the strongest growth.
The restaurant chains that won social media advertising wars in 2Q:
Social media trends indicate rising momentum for select QSRs & casual diners
Using UBS Evidence Lab's Instagram (> Access dataset) and TikTok (> Access dataset) data, we assessed how brands performed on social media platforms in 2Q26. We analyzed followers, posts, and interactions to better understand brand visibility, sentiment, and consumer reactions to recent brand developments. We believe that brands with strong online communities and committed followers are better positioned to drive visit frequency and improve consumer interaction, supported by research indicating a correlation between views and traffic. Select QSR brands delivered strong Instagram interactions and likes growth y/y in 2Q26, including: Chipotle, McDonald's, Starbucks and Wendy's. Several casual dining brands also posted strong y/y TikTok follower growth, including LongHorn (+167%), Applebees (+103%), and Outback (75%), among the leaders.
Recent earnings commentary highlights benefit of effective social media
Social media is increasingly relevant for connecting with customers, building brand affinity and driving visits. Several restaurants highlighted effective social media strategy and contribution in recent earnings calls, including: CAKE, CMG SBUX, CBRL, CAVA, SHAK, SG, BROS, WING, & YUM, among others. Brands highlight social media as a lever to expand the reach at the top of the marketing funnel, stay culturally relevant (ie world cup, viral trends), engage directly with consumers, and maximize awareness for strategic initiatives (events, promotions, partnerships). Several brands have also gained significant attention from user-generated content and word-of-mouth across social media which might not be reflected in the brands' own account metrics. In 2Q26, several brands had viral moments online including: 1) Cheesecake Factory's Linda's Chocolate Cake, Eggroll sampler, and Chicken Costoletta 'menu hack' went viral and contributed to strong sales results for the brand, w/ CAKE's own social media content playing into these trends; 2) 'My ___ Order' video trend for Taco Bell (YUM), SBUX, CMG, WING, and WEN; 3) continued popularity of the Chili's (EAT) Triple Dipper cheese pull trend; and 4) user- generated content for new menu items at Taco Bell, SG, & SHAK.
Instagram engagement increased y/y for select QSR brands in 2Q
Instagram engagement increased across select casual-fine dining brands in 2Q
Other notable Instagram/TikTok takeaways from analysis (data inside):
Instagram Analysis - 2Q26
The big takeaway is that one viral social media campaign can capture younger consumers' attention and instantly translate online engagement into a surge in restaurant traffic and delivery orders.
Really seems like Olive Garden's social media team needs a revamp.
Professional subscribers can find more consumer trends here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. It's just one search away.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 06:55Authored by Jason Nelson via Decrypto.co,
A volunteer security initiative says it used frontier AI models to scan 150 Bitcoin repositories and found more than a dozen vulnerabilities as developers increasingly use artificial intelligence to audit blockchains.
In a post on X earlier this week, AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton said the group has spent about $20,000 on AI services while building a "Bitcoin red team" platform.
“We have been working around the clock, with ~$20,000 of spend up to this point across different services,” he wrote.
“Funding is secured, I appreciate all the gestures for donations but it is not necessary. The bill is taken care of.”
A red team refers to cybersecurity professionals who test software from an attacker's perspective, probing for vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
According to Hamilton, the Bitcoin red team uses Kimi K3 alongside OpenAI’s GPT Sol, Anthropic’s Claude Fable and Opus models, and Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 to identify vulnerabilities and generate supporting documentation.
“We also have been connected with OpenAI for some help so I could manage getting the Cyber Harness running as well,” he wrote.
“It's a much more expensive scan, but well worth it for load-bearing portions of the Bitcoin ecosystem and has already yielded good results.”
Pseudonymous Bitcoin developer Calle said the initiative has built multiple AI-powered review systems targeting wallets, cryptographic libraries, infrastructure, and other Bitcoin projects.
"We're averaging on the order of one critical exploit per hour per person,” Calle wrote on X.
“We've reported critical vulnerabilities to several projects in the last 12 hours. Thankfully, this is a very expensive exercise. We're burning through $10,000 per day."
According to Calle, in the first 29.8 hours of its operation, its team has found 4,962 potential issues across 390 projects.
As many as 720 of them are considered high- or critical-level issues.
So far, 21.4% of findings have been able to be reproduced.
The team did not disclose which projects were affected or provide details of the vulnerabilities.
The announcement comes as AI is playing a growing role in finding security flaws across the crypto industry.
Earlier this year, researchers using Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 uncovered a four-year-old flaw in Zcash that could have allowed attackers to create unlimited counterfeit ZEC. In August, Coinkite said it believes attackers used AI to identify the Coldcard wallet vulnerability, while Bitcoin bridge Boltz suspended its swap service after saying attackers were using AI to identify vulnerabilities faster than its team could patch them.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 06:30Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America's rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
From an electoral-risk perspective, Piker is becoming a liability for Democrats. His far-left, anti-American rhetoric provides Republicans with what we called "a gift" last week. Even Hillary Clinton warned on Friday that the GOP's "anti-communist messaging is very effective."
💥NEW: Hillary Clinton: "It's not just about Michigan — but the Republican messaging is: 'communist, socialist.' It's gonna be a VERY effective attack." pic.twitter.com/PS6ObKoZli
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) August 7, 2026The Democratic Party's failure to formally denounce Piker and distance itself from his agenda...
Piker calls on his followers to "kill capitalists":
Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:
“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”
Democrats are campaigning with him. pic.twitter.com/YiZxGgRkgc
Piker: "We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they're gonna f**k your sisters and then your daughters. We're here to destroy the White Race, Bitch."
Hasan Piker says he wants to FLOOD illegals into the United States so they can "f*ck your sisters and daughters" to "destroy the white race"
I am demanding the Democratic Party voice PUBLICLY that they denounce Hasan Piker's comments.
If they don't, let this post be proof…
Piker: "Overall, my favorite flag is Hezbollah."
Hasan Piker, sitting at a table with an LGBTQ+ flag, says: “Overall, my favorite flag is Hezbollah.”
He’s actively campaigning with Democrat senate and gubernatorial candidates. pic.twitter.com/9QrtKqMKnl
Piker: "America deserved 9/11. I do not support the United States of America."
Hasan Piker: “America deserved 9/11. I do not support the United States of America.”
Currently campaigning with Abdul El-Seyed. pic.twitter.com/LDjizrQgVN
Piker: "I don't have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America."
Hasan Piker: "I don't have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America."
This is the same guy who praises Communist China every chance he gets, and he's now the face Bernie, AOC, and El-Sayed want fronting the Democrat Party. Scary stuff. 😳 pic.twitter.com/Dr4enTuIhC
...deserves considerable scrutiny.
🚨 Hasan Piker quotes:
✅ America deserved 9/11
✅ Go back to Auschwitz
✅ Let the streets run red with capitalist blood
✅ Racist comments about blacks and Asians
✅ Supports China, Russia, Cuba
✅ Supports Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis
Piker's close proximity to DSA-aligned candidates, combined with anti-American rhetoric and revolutionary Marxism that is hostile to America's political and capitalist system, has federal investigators examining the possibility that revolutionary activity is being supported by foreign subversion networks:
Piker is becoming such a liability for America's left that a potential inflection point may have been reached.
JNS reports that the University of Washington has decided to cancel a scheduled Piker event. This taxpayer-funded institution offers extensive coursework shaped by Marxist, feminist, and other far-left frameworks while placing limited emphasis on capitalism. If even one of America's most progressive universities now views Piker as a liability, it may signal the beginning of a broader retreat from America-hating communists who spread hateful and violent rhetoric among America's youth.
"I'm happy that the University of Washington, for literally the first time ever, has made the correct decision to not have an America-hating communist spread his hatred and terrible ideology to young people at our taxpayer-funded universities," Travis Couture, a Republican state representative, told JNS.
"Obviously universities are a place for First Amendment free speech, but someone who said that America deserves 9/11 and that capitalist blood should spill in the street should not be someone we are promoting with our tax dollars," Couture said.
"Every elected official and taxpayer-funded organization should be asked to condemn socialism, communism and Democratic Socialists of America people like Hasan Piker," Couture told JNS. "If they will not condemn those people, actions and extreme ideology, then they should be disqualified from serving the people of Washington state."
The cancellation suggests that his political toxicity may now outweigh his usefulness in mobilizing socialist and Marxist candidates who campaign on positions that denounce America and capitalism and are deeply unpopular with mainstream voters.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 06:11From around 2014 through 2023 nearly every aspect of western pop culture from movies to television to comic books to video games to marketing was invaded by what seemed like a highly coordinated horde of far-left activists. This subversive coup in entertainment launched what many now refer to as the "woke era" in western politics, giving birth to the infamous concepts of "cancel culture" and "DEI".
The movement was incredibly well supported with billions in funding through ESG lending and government subsidies. Politicians protected them from legal consequences and helped to censor their opponents. Mainstream journalists lavished them with praise and ran propaganda to tear down critics.
NGOs funneled easy cash into any organization that declared its fealty to the progressive multicultural agenda. True beleivers were planted into every level of every media industry. Those companies that did not immediately comply were extorted into conformity with threats of mob harassment, accusations of "bigotry" and potential boycotts.
Numerous corporations fully embraced and enabled the spread of the woke mind virus. Even though the political left often claims they are "fighting against the elitist class", their entire movement owes its existence to corporate and government support.
The battle against the woke takeover had been bubbling under the surface for many years as a rebellion was waged by a small but scrappy alternative media. However, at that time, the public was largely unaware of the psy-op that was targeting them. There was nowhere near enough popular momentum to stop the coup. All the political left had to do was deny that any such an agenda existed. It was "all in people's heads" and a product of "conspiracy theory."
Then, leftist activists hijacked video games and video game journalism, injected the industry with woke messaging and pissing off millions of gamers. After that, everything changed.
"Gamergate" was born and the anti-feminist, anti-DEI movement exploded like wildfire. What Gamergate accomplished, mainly, was forcing the issue into the mainstream and forcing the establishment media to acknowledge that a coordinated invasion was taking place. Journalists went from denying the existence of the agenda to openly defending the agenda as a good thing.
One game development studio that stood at the forefront of the woke mob and aggressively engaged in the culture war against traditional western storytelling was Bethesda Softworks, a subsidiary of Microsoft. Once a legendary studio famous for the "Fallout" franchise, the company ultimately reveled in the subversion of their largely straight, male audience and sought to "teach the Chuds a lesson" by destroying everything they held dear.
Asmongold reacts to Bethesda employees being forced to tear down a memorial for laid off coworkers
"Yesterday's layoffs at Bethesda cut 14 layers of management, we lost dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers, many of whom worked on BGS for decades"
"Apparently… pic.twitter.com/Df7iygAMXF
Simultaneously, Bethesda was engaging in political support for activist projects like Black Lives Matter and LGBT pride. The virtue signaling was off the charts. The fight with the studio hit a crescendo with the release of "Starfield", an open world sci-fi game that seemed to focus more on DEI and pronouns than creative storytelling. The game was meant to be Bethesda's crowing achievement, but it failed due to gamer boycotts.
Starfield, which cost around $400 million to produce, was met with a mediocre reception and within a few months player numbers crashed by 90%. Evidence suggests the game never actually made a profit. The ongoing failures of Bethesda contributed to the wider cuts by Microsoft/X Box and studio was hit particularly hard.
In 2026, the Chuds are rejoicing over the collapse of studios like Bethesda, and rightly so. Gamers tried to warn them but they refused to listen.
Last month, Microsoft announced a financial "reset" which led to structural layoffs. As a result, Bethesda has now fired an estimated 30%-40% of employees with a large number of developers being kicked to the curb. It should come as no surprise that most of these employees look exactly as you might expect: A gaggle of socialist circus freaks.
Seeing these former employees all together in one place makes it perfectly clear what caused Bethesda to implode.
Some analysts theorize that the Microsoft culling is actually meant to rectify mistakes from the woke era and purge activist troublemakers from their payroll. A large number of corporations have been doing the same thing in recent years after realizing there is no market for DEI in media. Having the faintest smell of social justice propaganda in their products leads to collapsing sales.
By extension, woke activist employees are notorious for creating problems from thin air and litigating against their employers. There's really no downside to firing them.
The delusion these former developers suffer from is embarrassing. They seem convinced that their projects were financially successful, but if that was the case they would not be losing their jobs en masse. The event is yet another example of the entitlement mentality that has infected corporate employees today; they treat any firing as if it is a violation of someone's civil rights. If a worker believes that a company is supposed to value their livelihood above making a profit, that person is not mentally equipped to function in the real world.
Remaining workers at the company staged a mock memorial for their fired comrades, as if they had died in the line of duty. It's more evidence for why their hands should never come near media content ever again. They should be serving overpriced coffee at Starbucks, not influencing $400 million media projects.
For the conservatives who still don't understand the importance of pop media and video games when it comes to the greater political conflict in the west, just know that it doesn't matter if you don't get it; just know that the political left does get it. They almost successfully pirated the entire western world by taking control of entertainment media and saturating it with woke indoctrination.
If it's important to them, it should damn well be important to you.
Politics is downstream from culture. Win the culture war, win the west. It's that simple. Video games represent the biggest slice of the media industry by far and this is where younger generations are going to congregate and form their collective views. Luckily, they saw the takeover coming and moved to intercept before it was too late.
At least greater populist movements are more aligned with the importance of the culture war and what it represents in recent years. There are still numerous problems with getting everyone on the same page, but compared to a decade ago, the improvement has been dramatic. The fact that "Get Woke, Go Broke" has become a rule rather than a mantra is a bit of a miracle.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 05:45Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
A young British man walked out of a Manchester shop with a brand new baseball bat still sealed in its factory plastic packaging. Within moments, multiple police officers were on him, treating the purchase as a weapon and detaining him in full view of the street.
The footage, which spread rapidly on Sunday, captures the absolute state of policing in modern Britain. Officers challenge the lad, physical contact follows, backup including motorbike units arrives, and he ends up in a police van.
The bat's plastic covering remains clearly visible throughout. No claim has emerged that he brandished it, threatened anyone, or used it for anything other than carrying it home after a legitimate purchase.
Meanwhile in Manchester ??
A British lad just bought a brand new baseball bat from a shop and is POUNCED upon by MULTIPLE police officers immediately after leaving the store.
The officers accuse him of "carrying a weapon" even though the bat was clearly brand new and just... pic.twitter.com/FNZGRQnYy5
Under the Prevention of Crime Act 1953, officers can stop and check items that could be used as offensive weapons in public if there is no clear reasonable excuse. A brand-new bat still in its shop packaging, purchased moments earlier, is the definition of a reasonable excuse for any ordinary person. Yet the response was immediate and multi-officer.
This incident does not stand alone. It fits a documented pattern that has played out repeatedly under the current climate of policing.
In early July, footage from Birmingham showed a white teenager who had just been attacked by a group of black males. A female officer moved in, shielded the aggressors, and directed force at the victim.
Multiple officers then swarmed the white lad, used foul language including "You're going to walk to the car you fucking dick," forced him into a police car the wrong way, and dragged him back out.
A bystander trying to explain that the white teenager was the victim was ignored. The attackers left without consequence. West Midlands Police were reported to have discouraged further sharing of the footage rather than addressing the conduct on camera.
That same period produced further examples. South Yorkshire Police officers were filmed shoving, baton-wielding and pointing Tasers at teenage girls during a dispersal in Rotherham. The force itself described the short clip as appearing "nothing short of shocking."
Rotherham, of course, remains the site of the long-running grooming gangs scandal in which authorities failed for years to protect native British girls. Officers have also been captured manhandling a five-year-old boy, slamming a man's head into a metal bollard, and using heavy force against a military veteran simply sitting on a wall filming while stating he was doing nothing wrong.
The following days brought another layer of absurdity. Officers were filmed confronting people for standing around in public squares doing nothing, threatening arrest for filming in public on the grounds that presence "might" wind someone up and lead to a breach of the peace, and even entering a pub to warn a man over a critical tweet about a local councillor.
One Merseyside officer was caught calling a man legally filming a "nonce." Resources that should have been directed at actual violence were instead spent inventing pre-crime justifications against ordinary citizens exercising basic rights.
Meanwhile the daily reality on Britain's streets continues without pause. People are being stabbed and assaulted hour after hour, day after day. The endless stream of reports is dominated by migrants and feral gangs.
Knives, machetes and random street attacks fill the crime logs and the local news. Strangely, the videos of white British lads roaming around smashing people with baseball bats remain vanishingly rare.
The cameras and the officers somehow never seem to catch that particular threat in action. Yet a sealed bat bought from a shop is enough to trigger an immediate multi-officer response.
The common thread is selective aggression. Native British people going about lawful business - buying sports equipment, filming in public, standing still, or simply existing as the victim of an assault - face rapid, multi-officer responses.
Patterns of violence involving other demographics frequently receive a lighter touch or none at all. The Henry Nowak case remains the most egregious recent illustration: the white student handcuffed while dying after his killer falsely claimed racial abuse, while the actual attacker was not restrained in the same way.
Police chiefs have denied the existence of two-tier policing while acknowledging that the public perception is widespread. Anti-racism guidance that instructed officers not to treat everyone "the same" has been under review precisely because of the damage it has done to trust. The result on the ground is what the Manchester bat video shows: a young man treated as a threat for carrying a sealed item out of a shop.
Equal treatment under the law is not optional. When officers prioritise optics, ideology, or fear of certain accusations over consistent application of the rules, public confidence collapses.
A brand-new baseball bat in plastic is not a public order crisis. Treating it as one while real threats are managed with kid gloves is the crisis. Britons are watching these clips in growing numbers. The pattern is no longer deniable.
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Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 05:00Iran's IRGC is holding the line, reiterating that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen to international shipping only after the United States accepts all of its conditions, which we outlined previously. Also, on Saturday Iran's army spokesman Amir Akraminia stated that Iran's new protocols in the Strait of Hormuz are "irreversible" and shall not be thwarted by the US. "The United States has no choice but to accept the existing situation; otherwise, it will incur costs far greater than those it has faced in the past," Akraminia said.
On Sunday, a fresh report in The Wall Street Journal states the obvious - that President Trump has fewer and fewer options and is being squeezed, with any opportunity to declare 'victory' and make swift exit more elusive than ever, given Washington would have to make huge compromises, including lifting sanctions and paying war compensation to Tehran. Nearly six months ago when the war started, many non-interventionist critics accurately predicted the quagmire and catch-22 the US now finds itself in.
"For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said," WSJ writes.
AFP/Getty Images"But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things," the report adds.
In a parallel vein to this scaled-back, lower grade conflict, President Trump has freshly told Axios in a brief interview that "We are low keying it" in the Persian Gulf. This comes after a week ago he called off 'planned' 'harder' attacks on Iran, which may have been just a bluff all along. Tehran didn't blink, and it continues to press for maximal demands - as if to put 'maximum pressure' right back on Washington.
"We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money," Trump claimed. According to more from Axios:
Ironically, this is simply a return to administration talking points which defended the early days and weeks of a war that officials constantly touted would be 'swift' and limited.
The US hope was that Iran and its economy would just collapse from within, the masses would take to the streets, and the government of the Ayatollah would be overthrown. This has proven delusional time and again.
Instead, what we see happening is Washington being forced to move its bases back from front line areas in the Gulf, and officials including Trump himself constantly retreating from stated goals, objectives, and red lines. This is on display once again in the Sunday Axios interview:
Axios acknowledges that the new list of Iranian demands have gone from being the prerequisite for a nuclear deal to a prerequisite to opening the Strait. Trump now says the US is “low keying it” and focusing on economic pressure. In other words: the Strait will not be opening. https://t.co/AweQabOB8W pic.twitter.com/3TMsxXcfh7
— barry with the NED (@bonzerbarry) August 9, 2026In the meantime, there have been various op-ed moments throughout the conflict where The Wall Street Journal has cheer-led Operation Epic Fury. But now that political desperation has set in, and the Iranians smell blood in the water - knowing they can play hardball and extract a bigger cost from the US - even the WSJ has been forced to drastically change its tune:
Iran’s ability to essentially choke off the waterway through sporadic missile and drone attacks has proven to be powerful leverage for the country, stalling commercial traffic and roiling global oil markets. Trump has declared repeatedly in recent weeks that the Strait of Hormuz was already fully open, but each of those promises has proven premature.
Now, with less than three months until the midterm elections and the price of gasoline still much higher than it was before the war started in late February, Trump has been looking for ways to tell the American public that the war is won.
It will be quite the spectacle if eventually a desperate Trump White House is forced to lift sanctions and hand over some form of war compensation. WSJ notes further, "One major complication for the Trump administration is money."
"Iran is seeking billions of dollars in war reparations in addition to an agreement to unfreeze the country’s assets around the world," the report adds. "Trump has said the White House wouldn’t allow any taxpayer money to go to Iran, although a deal appears unlikely without the U.S. unfreezing some assets, possibly with conditions attached."
Trump should have listened to the non-interventionists and he wouldn't have put himself and the American people in this mess. American troops would not have been caught so flat-footed and directly in harm's way (given what was clearly lack of proper US military planning and preparedness for Iran to fight back as fiercely as it did), and hundreds of Iranian civilian lives - including massacred schoolgirls - would have been sparred.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/10/2026 - 04:55