☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Judge rules Google has illegal monopoly over search
- In other news: Louisiana news outlets file lawsuit over new law requiring distance from police
- Looking ahead: X sues group of advertisers, alleging boycott
- Chart of the week: The gap between Americans’ interest in and access to local election news
🔥 Featured story
A federal judge ruled this week that Google has maintained an illegal monopoly over the online search market. The Justice Department originally brought the case, claiming that Google unfairly cemented its dominance by paying companies such as Apple and Samsung to make its platform the default search function on those companies’ devices. The ruling cited data showing that Google has an 89.2% share of the market for general search – including 94.9% on mobile devices.
About seven-in-ten U.S. adults say they often (27%) or sometimes (44%) get news from Google or other search engines, including 15% who say they prefer to get news this way over any other platform, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey. This is similar to the share of Americans who prefer to get news on social media (12%).
📌 In other news
- Louisiana news outlets file lawsuit over a new law limiting ability to film police
- Former Kansas police chief who led raid on a newspaper to face criminal charge
- UK officials say X has been resistant to taking down disinformation and incendiary content during far-right riots
- Axios announces it will lay off 50 employees, 10% of its staff
- How organizations are enlisting influencers to cover the Paris Olympics
- Democrats turn to influencers to win over voters online
- A look at ad companies profiting off obituary content mills
- Turkey’s president criticizes social media companies after the country blocks Instagram, saying it silences Palestinian voices
📅 Looking ahead
The social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that the group’s brand safety initiative, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, helped coordinate an advertiser boycott of the platform. Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the website formerly known as Twitter and subsequent changes in content moderation policies, many companies pulled their ads due to concerns they’d be displayed next to posts containing misinformation or hate speech.
At the time of a March 2023 Center survey, partisans on the platform had already grown apart in their views about misinformation and civility. For example, Democratic users (including independents who lean Democratic) were far more likely than their Republican and GOP-leaning counterparts to say inaccurate or misleading information was a major problem on the site (68% vs. 37%). According to a 2024 Center survey, Republicans are about twice as likely as Democrats to say the site is good for democracy (53% vs. 26%). Democrats are three times as likely as Republicans to say it’s bad (39% vs. 13%).
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart is from a recent Center study on how Americans get local political news. A majority of U.S. adults (70%) say they are at least somewhat interested in news about local elections, including 34% who are extremely or very interested. However, fewer than half of Americans (45%) say it is very or somewhat easy to find the information they need to make voting decisions in local elections. By comparison, 59% say it is easy to find the information they need to decide who to vote for in presidential elections.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Sarah Naseer, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Katerina Eva Matsa, Michael Lipka and Mark Jurkowitz, and copy edited by Rebecca Leppert.
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