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Comment by aclelland | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions that some AU residents have been able to bypass this ban by linking to tweets of news stories. Has Twitter indicated whether it'll be following the Facebook or Google route? I can only imagine that they will be covered by this regulation too.

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The law will apply to platforms at the discretion of the Treasurer. If he/she decides it will apply to Twitter, it will; if not, it won't.

This sounds like it should be illegal. Why is the government allowed to make laws that specify individual entities. Surely they should be required to come up with some classification that covers every business like google and facebook.

My guess is that Rupert Murdoch didn't think Twitter was a problem.

Possibly because its feeds are not filtered and it doesn't scrape content in any form. It's also short form so you're not going to get a more than a brief summary of a news story and most likely a link.

It's feeds aren't filtered? That's not true. And it's besides the point. Murdoch didn't shakedown Facebook because Facebook's feed is filtered. He decided to do so because advertisers moved from his properties to Facebook/Google and he wants that revenue back. Kinda like ocean liners wanting a cut of airlines' profits.

Murdoch didn't think bother with Twitter because Twitter's profits are slim.

> The government says the code will initially focus on Google and Facebook, but could be expanded to other tech companies.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56107028

And what if Twitter registered themselves as a news company in Australia? Would newspapers using links to tweets (or images of tweets) have to pay twitter? This would be really funny.

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