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A Loooong List of Non-News Sites That Have Been Banned By Facebook

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Tegan Jones
A Loooong List of Non-News Sites That Have Been Banned By Facebook

Facebook has now officially banned Australian news from its platform. Unfortunately this has also included a heap of Pages that aren’t actually news. This includes government, public service and state health pages. Here’s a list of what we’ve found so far.

In addition to larger organisations, we have seen plenty of reports on social media of smaller, local pages also being impacted. For example, children’s sports clubs.

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This article is being updated, if you have found any yourself send us an email. 

Big thanks to Cam Wilson and Kevin Nguyen on Twitter for kicking off the list collation.

Public Services and charities

Organisations and businesses

Government Organisations (Including health departments)

Satire

Betoota Advocate, The Shovel and The Chaser were all originally nerfed but they’re all back now.

Sadly The Onion is still down for Aussies Facebook users.

Why is this happening?

The draft for the bill is quite vague when it comes to ‘covered news’. In fact, it defines it as any content that reports, investigates or explains issues and events relevant to the Australian public.

This covers a hell of a lot. And the Pages that have been inadvertently banned can fall into those categories despite not being news sites themselves.

Still, it seems wild that kids sports can get banned for what, maybe sharing some local news stories every now and then?

Will this Facebook Ban keep applying to non news pages?

The good news for these organisations, however, is that the pages seem like they’re going to be restored.

According to SMH reporter, Zoe Samios on Twitter, Facebook has said it has acted in the broadest definition of the law, which is not yet to come into effect. The social media giant has also reportedly said that it will reverse the ban on pages that have been accidentally impacted.

“Government Pages should not be impacted… As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted. However, we will reverse any Pages that are inadvertently impacted,” the statement in the tweet reads.

There are also some Pages listed as being nerfed by Twitter users (with screenshots to prove it), such as NSW Health and Fire and Rescue NSW, that are now displaying as normal for Gizmodo Australia.

Hopefully this means that Facebook has already gotten to work at restoring Pages that should not be considered as news.

 

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