☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Indonesia to require technology companies to pay for media they use
- New from Pew Research Center: Introducing the Pew-Knight Initiative
- In other news: Poland’s new government brings changes to public media
- Looking ahead: House leadership announces task force on AI issues
- Chart of the week: Wide partisan differences in attention to news about the U.S.-Mexico border situation
🔥 Featured story
Indonesia recently announced new rules for tech companies requiring them to pay for the media they use on their platforms. The law aims to level the playing field between local media and global tech companies that operate in the country, including Meta and Google. Australia and Canada have taken similar steps in the past couple of years.
About three-quarters of Indonesians (78%) use the internet at least occasionally, including 96% of adults ages 18 to 39, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey. A similar share (76%) own a smartphone, and 73% use social media sites.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
Pew Research Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation have announced a five-year partnership aimed at improving our understanding of how Americans gather information about the world around them – and how that information fuels their beliefs, shapes their identities, forges their communities and inspires civic participation.
The Pew-Knight Initiative will use diverse methodologies to provide a comprehensive, real-time look at the fast-evolving information landscape from the standpoints of both consumers and producers of news.
📌 In other news
- A look at the sweeping changes Poland’s new government is making to its public media
- How Palestinian photographer Motaz Azaiza documented Gaza’s suffering
- The theft of a radio tower in Walker County, Alabama
- How Sinclair Media centers crime reporting in its TV programming
- Illinois introduces legislation to support local journalism
- How drill rap can be a form of journalism
📅 Looking ahead
House leadership announced earlier this week the formation of a new bipartisan task force aimed at regulating AI technologies.
According to a Pew Research Center survey from last year, Americans who have heard of ChatGPT largely worry about insufficient government regulation as chatbots become more widespread. Two-thirds say they are more concerned that government will not go far enough in regulating chatbot use than that regulations will go too far. This view is more common among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than among their Republican and Republican-leaning counterparts (75% vs. 59%).
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from our recent report on how Americans view the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Republicans are paying closer attention to news about the border than Democrats are: 43% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they are following this news topic extremely or very closely, compared with 20% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
👋 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 Anna Jackson.
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