The goal of the block was for Aussies to stop seeing and sharing news. That means all news sites worldwide blocked from Aussie feeds and Aussie news sites had all their posts blocked from being published anywhere.
Identifying what Pages were Aussie news sites obviously caught way more than people expected. Facebook clearly said they started with the broad and vague definition in the proposed legislation. And services like health alerts and weather reports are traditionally considered "news" so that would explain why they got caught. It also caught a lot of other unexpected collateral. Local community news groups got swept up. Foreign entertainment news sites got blocked. It was pretty massive.
I watch only one free-to-air TV news service (happens to be the left-most one, natch) and they've always been upfront about their website. The other one I used to watch I still listen to a bit of radio and follow their Twitter accounts and they've also always encouraged people to go directly to their websites.
There have been conflicting reports that the otherwise mainstream news websites - such as the Murdoch owned ones - have had somewhere between 16% and 96% drop on traffic. Look, 6% is noticeable, so they must have noticed, but I think it's a lot closer to 16% than 96% because otherwise they'd be screaming bloody murder and I haven't seen that.
Responses on FB and Twitter that I have seen have mostly been "this government is being told what to do by Murdoch - such idiots" but there were a few people objecting. Fortunately, it was quite easy to squash their wrong theories.
Wade.
Identifying what Pages were Aussie news sites obviously caught way more than people expected. Facebook clearly said they started with the broad and vague definition in the proposed legislation. And services like health alerts and weather reports are traditionally considered "news" so that would explain why they got caught. It also caught a lot of other unexpected collateral. Local community news groups got swept up. Foreign entertainment news sites got blocked. It was pretty massive.
I watch only one free-to-air TV news service (happens to be the left-most one, natch) and they've always been upfront about their website. The other one I used to watch I still listen to a bit of radio and follow their Twitter accounts and they've also always encouraged people to go directly to their websites.
There have been conflicting reports that the otherwise mainstream news websites - such as the Murdoch owned ones - have had somewhere between 16% and 96% drop on traffic. Look, 6% is noticeable, so they must have noticed, but I think it's a lot closer to 16% than 96% because otherwise they'd be screaming bloody murder and I haven't seen that.
Responses on FB and Twitter that I have seen have mostly been "this government is being told what to do by Murdoch - such idiots" but there were a few people objecting. Fortunately, it was quite easy to squash their wrong theories.
Wade.