☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: X tests new feature highlighting posts people agree on
- In other news: Washington Post to publish more opinion pieces from outside sources
- Looking ahead: Celebrity magazines among four publications shutting down
- Chart of the week: Is X good for American democracy? Partisan views have flipped since 2021
🔥 Featured story
X (formerly Twitter) is piloting a new use for its Community Notes feature: flagging posts that generate agreement from users who normally have differing views, Axios is reporting. The end goal is to highlight areas of common ground and make the site less polarizing.
While 55% of X users who are Democrats or lean Democratic think X tends to support the views of conservatives over liberals, the prevailing view among Republican and GOP-leaning users is that the site supports both kinds of views equally (56%), according to a recent Center survey.
Democratic users also are much more likely than Republican users to say inaccurate and misleading information (71% vs. 24%) and the tone or civility of discussions (54% vs. 18%) are major problems on X. There were virtually no differences between the parties on these questions in 2021, before Elon Musk purchased the site.
📌 In other news
- Washington Post to launch new initiative to feature more opinion writers from a variety of sources
- United Healthcare files defamation lawsuit against The Guardian
- Trump administration sends Congress its plan to restructure VOA
- OAN Pentagon correspondent says she was fired after criticizing Pete Hegseth
- Minnesota Star Tribune offers buyouts to experienced employees
- Massachusetts public media station announces layoffs
- A look into Trump’s posting behavior on Truth Social
- Oregon bill aims to get tech companies to compensate news outlets for the use of their reporting
📅 Looking ahead
McClatchy Media Company has announced that four magazines it owns – First for Women, In Touch, Life & Style and Closer – will cease publication in the coming weeks. A dwindling share of Americans get news from print publications: Just 4% say they prefer to get their news this way.
Some of these magazines focus largely on celebrities, a topic which many people do not consider to be news at all. Just 3% of U.S. adults say they think information about celebrities and their lives is definitely news, according to our recent exploration of how Americans define news.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from a new analysis of X users, who were asked if X (formerly Twitter) is mostly good or bad for U.S. democracy. A majority of Republican X users (58%) now say the platform is mostly good for democracy, up from 17% in 2021. (Elon Musk purchased the site in 2022.) Meanwhile, Democrats’ views have moved in the opposite direction: 17% of Democrats on X say the platform is good for democracy in 2025, down from 47% four years ago.
Meanwhile, 53% of Democratic users now say X is mostly bad for democracy, up from 28% in 2021. And the share of Republican users who say the platform is mostly bad for democracy has declined dramatically (to 11% in 2025 from 60% in 2021).
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by Anna Jackson.
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