The Week Bad Bunny Made the Super Bowl About a Lot More Than Football

The biggest content week of the year — Super Bowl Sunday through Valentine's Day — landed in the same seven-day window, and the internet handled it like the internet handles everything: by turning every possible moment into a side to be on. Below, everything worth understanding from the past week of social — what moved, why it moved, and what there is to learn from it.

🎤 Bad Bunny Performed in Spanish. Half the Internet Was Thrilled. The Other Half Was Not.

Bad Bunny headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show on February 9th and performed almost entirely in Spanish, in front of the largest single-broadcast audience in American media. By Monday morning, the content wasn't about the performance — it was about the argument around it.

Creators broke almost cleanly into two camps: those who framed it as a historic statement about whose culture gets to occupy the main stage, and those who framed it as a baffling choice to present America's most-watched event in a language much of the audience doesn't speak. Both camps produced a massive volume of content. Neither ran out of material.

The dynamic here is worth understanding. The Super Bowl halftime show generates enormous content every year, but the format that actually sustains through the week isn't highlight clips. It's the argument the performance created. Bad Bunny handed content creators a clear binary — celebration or critique — and the algorithm rewards clear binaries because they're easy to engage with in either direction. The cultural debate became the product, not the set list.

What to take from it: event-driven content lives longer when the event has a legible conflict built in. The performance was the trigger. The argument was the content.

💌 Valentine's Day Was the Second-Largest Content Moment of the Week

Valentine's Day (Feb 14) generated 1,569 posts in the tracked data — second only to the ongoing scripted couple drama format that runs at scale every week regardless of the calendar. What actually performed wasn't the polished gift-guide posts or the restaurant reservation vlogs. It was reactive content: the unscripted moment someone gets surprised at a door, the proposal reaction captured on a ring doorbell camera, the video of someone crying over a card they didn't expect to mean anything.

Authenticity isn't a buzzword here — it's a data observation. The gap between produced Valentine's content and reactive Valentine's content, in engagement terms, was not close. People don't want to watch someone receive a beautiful gift on a produced set. They want to watch someone actually feel something.

The other format that dominated: comedic grief. People who were single, people who were annoyed by the holiday, people performing resentment at their own participation in it. The anti-Valentine's angle runs every year and every year it surprises brands who assume the holiday is monolithic. It is not. There's a substantial and very engaged audience that likes Valentine's Day content about not liking Valentine's Day.

💑 Relationship Drama Is the Largest Content Vertical You're Probably Not Paying Attention To

The single biggest cluster in the data this week — 1,589 posts, more than Valentine's Day, more than the Super Bowl — wasn't about any news event at all.

It was scripted and semi-scripted couple drama. Loyalty test scenarios. Jealousy pranks. Commitment interrogations staged for the camera. Emotional confrontations between partners where both parties know they're being filmed but perform the tension anyway. This content runs at massive, consistent scale every single week on TikTok and Instagram, with no news hook, no promotional infrastructure, and no brand investment. It doesn't need any of those things.

The reason it performs isn't complicated: it's a drama format that everyone has personal experience to map onto. The creator doesn't need to be famous. The scenario just needs to feel real or plausible enough to create a response. The top-performing posts in this cluster came from accounts with under 100,000 followers.

This is what social intelligence built on transcripts — not just captions — actually shows you. The volume is invisible to platforms that are reading hashtags and post metadata. But in the spoken word, at scale, this format is one of the loudest things happening on short-form video every week. Evergreen doesn't mean low-stakes. It means recurring and reliable, which is more valuable.

🎬 Wuthering Heights Put People Back in Movie Theaters on Camera

The Wuthering Heights adaptation — Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi — dropped this week and drove something you don't see often with streaming-era film releases: theater-attendance content. Creators posted themselves walking into the cinema. Leaving the cinema, visibly wrecked. Sharing reaction videos from their car immediately after. The film functioned as an event in the old sense — you had to be there, and there was social value in demonstrating that you were.

Theater POV content worked here because the film was positioned as culturally unmissable. That positioning created a participation incentive that most releases don't have. The best marketing for Wuthering Heights this week came from audiences going to see it on camera and telling everyone how it made them feel. The studio didn't create that content. The audience did.

What to take from it: theatrical event content doesn't come from distribution strategy. It comes from a film that gives audiences a feeling they want to broadcast. You can't manufacture it, but you can create conditions where it's more likely to happen.

🏛️ Trump Administration Policy Commentary Is an Evergreen Format Now

707 posts of political reaction to Trump administration decisions, rhetoric, and voter behavior — concentrated in the first two weeks of February as early second-term policy moves started generating response. The content lived almost entirely on Instagram, skewed commentary and analysis over pure reaction, and ran at high engagement on both supportive and critical sides.

The observation worth noting: political commentary at this volume has become structurally indistinguishable from other evergreen content categories. It runs every week, feeds on whatever the news cycle provides, and sustains regardless of what that week's specific story is. The format exists independently of any individual news event. Brands and creators who have avoided this lane entirely haven't escaped it — they've just ceded it.

Everything Else

Brazilian Carnival — Running Feb 9–16, almost entirely TikTok, almost entirely nano creators documenting their own nights. Get-ready-with-mes, outfit showcases, chaos vlogs. The formula is the same every year: the chaos is the content. The accounts with 2,000 followers covering their own Carnival outperformed accounts with 500,000 covering the event professionally. That gap is consistent across every grassroots cultural celebration and worth internalizing.

Celebrity Basketball and Super Bowl Activations — A separate, healthy cluster of celebrity-athlete crossover content from Super Bowl week events. The format that worked: celebrities visibly struggling at athletic tasks under the patient supervision of actual athletes. The humiliation-plus-genuine-warmth combination runs every time, at every event. It is never the sport that goes viral. It's the human moment happening around the sport.

Money Mindset Content — 1,073 posts of financial philosophy content running completely independently of any news event. Rich versus wealthy distinctions. Money hypotheticals. Unsolicited fiscal life coaching. Global, multi-language, high-volume, every week. This is one of the largest consistent content verticals on short-form video and most brands in adjacent spaces — financial services, consumer goods, lifestyle — leave it entirely unaddressed. The audience is enormous and highly engaged. Someone is going to figure out how to show up here well.

Surfaced is published every week by Glystn — a social intelligence system that listens to millions of creator posts to find what's actually moving. Not the captions. The conversations.