It was a bumper quarter for The Economist on X (formerly Twitter), with the publication seeing a near 50% increase in engagement compared to Q1, by far the biggest increase on any platform. That’s a major jump for a legacy publisher on a platform where news publishers have seen declining or flat metrics recently. So what drove the growth?
Quite simply, Brazil.
Between April and June 2025, The Economist published 23 of The Economist’s top 1,000 posts focused on Brazilian politics and its judiciary. Together, those posts generated a staggering 44% of all engagement across the quarter, despite making up just 2.3% of total output. On average, Brazil-related posts earned 12,500 interactions each on the platform, compared to just 360 for non-Brazil topics—a more than 34x difference.
Seven of the ten most-engaged posts shared reporting about Alexandre de Moraes, one of Brazil’s Supreme Court Justices. The stories interrogated his power, independence, and the broader implications for Brazilian democracy. But this wasn’t one-note coverage, Brazil’s President Lula and the role of the military also featured in other stories, giving more context .
No figure embodies the problems with Brazil’s Supreme Court more than Alexandre de Moraes. His record shows that judicial power needs to be pared back https://t.co/uOvG0Nj4na
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) April 16, 2025
This isn’t the first time The Economist has struck digital attention gold with international judicial turmoil. Just a few quarters ago, its coverage of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan’s legal woes delivered similarly outsized results. What’s becoming clear is that when The Economist commits to explaining foreign power structures, especially with a critical lens, it finds a highly engaged audience on X.
Beyond content, we also looked at the format of the top posts for the publisher. Posts with photo previews drove higher engagement than other formats, averaging 1,004 interactions compared to 608 for link posts and 302 for videos.
Perhaps most notably, the quarter was defined by the performance of a small number of breakout posts. The top 10% of content generated 79% of all interactions. It’s a reminder that virality—or at least concentrated attention—still plays a massive role in platform success.
The Economist’s Q2 results show that there’s still room for specialist publishers to thrive on X, especially when they lean into global storytelling. Brazil’s legal crisis may have dominated this quarter, but the real takeaway is the power of high-context, well-timed, and visually-supported international coverage to drive reach and engagement—even on a platform that’s notoriously tricky for legacy media.
For more on where publishers have seen success in Q2, head over to our report.
