Federal Government Lifts TikTok Ban & X Open Sources Its Algorithm | Reach Report No. 22

Good morning everyone!

Welcome back to the Reach Report.

Move in season is here and parents took over the feeds this week. We've also got the federal TikTok ban getting lifted, X open sourcing its For You algorithm, and a rough projection for fall international enrollment.

Let's dive in!

What’s New In Social Media

X Open Sourced Its Algorithm

X published the code behind the For You timeline to GitHub this week under an Apache 2.0 license. The release covers the full ranking engine, model configuration, filtering systems, and ranking parameters, roughly 10 to 15 times the size of what the company put out in 2023. The piece worth your attention shipped alongside it. There is now an "Under the Hood" page in the app's settings, allowing users who have posted 10 or more times over the past month to download their aggregate statistics as a JSON file, including any labels applied to their account or posts in the past calendar month. That is the first official way to check whether your reach is being throttled instead of guessing at it. The tool is a pilot for now, limited to accounts at least a year old, with a wider rollout to follow. Keith Coleman, X's VP of Product, suggests dropping the source code and your own export into an LLM and asking it what is holding your posts back.

Link to full X announcement & source code

Federal Government Lifts Ban On TikTok

On August 10 the OMB rescinded the 2023 memo that kept TikTok off federal devices, after a Justice Department opinion found ByteDance's 19.9% stake sits below the 20% threshold that defines control. That federal position was the anchor every state ban was built on, and it is gone. Which means higher ed gets to take TikTok seriously again. Students never stopped. TikTok ranked second only to Instagram among the platforms students named in our 2026 College Decision Playbook, and Pew has 61% of teens on it daily. The clearest proof is what happened to the accounts that went dark. We tracked 45 university accounts that have not posted in over a year. 36 of them gained followers anyway on zero new content.

You probably still cannot post. Your state law or your board has not caught up. That is the argument for starting now instead of waiting. Confirm somebody still has the credentials. Get the DOJ opinion and the OMB memo in front of whoever decides. Build the content bank while there is no pressure to publish. Purdue was the first major institution back, relaunching @PurdueUniversity on July 27 with content ready the day it turned the account on and has been posting daily since. That is the advantage sitting there right now. You cannot ship a strategy the week a restriction lifts, so the schools treating these next few months as prep time will be publishing while everyone else is still writing the proposal.

Instagram Refreshes Wordmark for First Time in a Decade

On the more trivial side of social this week, Instagram changed its wordmark for the first time since 2016. Instagram head Adam Mosseri called the new cursive leaning logo sharper and more modern, and confirmed the app icon is staying exactly as it is. Worth a quick pass through your media kits, templates, and anywhere else the old lockup lives, because all of it went out of date on Thursday.

What’s New Across Higher Ed

Fall 2026 International Enrollment is Projected to Drop 9.5% & up to 112,000 Fewer Students

NAFSA and JB International put out their fall 2026 international enrollment outlook last week, and the numbers are rough. Projection is 111,000 fewer international students, which lands at $3.4 billion in lost economic contribution and nearly 40,000 jobs. Graduate enrollment is driving most of it, with international applications to doctoral programs down 21 percent. What stands out is that almost none of this is a demand problem you can market your way out of. Visa appointment bottlenecks, a travel ban covering 39 countries, and the new duration of status rule are doing the damage.

Link to full article

Weekly Higher Ed Social Snapshot

Here's how higher ed accounts performed this past week. Averages across the board, who grew fastest, who got the most engagement, and the posts that pulled the biggest numbers.

Top Instagram Posts This Week by Engagement Rate

Top Facebook Posts This Week by Engagement Rate

Top TikTok Posts This Week by Engagement Rate

Blake’s Bookmarks

A few posts that stopped my scroll this week and why I think they worked.

What’s New At Reach

Filter for Text Only Posts In Content Research

We've added "Text" as a new format within the content research tool. Since Facebook is currently the only platform in research with text-only capability, it will only surface those posts. This allows you to find Facebook text posts with backgrounds, plain text posts, or status updates. We've seen text-only posts work very well for asking questions, so use it to find what other colleges are asking their Facebook community.

That's it for this week.

I want to hear what you thought. What was actually useful, what you skipped, what you'd want more of. If there's a section missing, a metric you'd rather see, or a post you think belongs in Blake's Bookmarks, send it over. Just hit reply, I read all of it.

And if something in here was useful, forward it to whoever on your team needs it.

New here? You can try Reach free for 30 days.

Until next time.

Want to chat? Schedule a time on my calendar

Got this forwarded? Subscribe here.

Missed the previous updates? Read them here.

Make sure I’m a contact & move to Primary to keep me out of spam.😄