Wikipedia:How to access US news websites

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Hundreds of US news websites are not globally accessible as they have blocked visitors from the EU due to the GDPR.[1][2] Some workarounds are listed here to allow those who are affected by this to access those sites anyway. The workarounds listed here may also work (YMMV) in cases where your country has blocked access to a particular site.

  1. Check if the Wayback Machine has archived the link, and if so, view it there.
  2. Use a free proxy website located in a country that isn't blocked. These may insert ads and the layout, text markup and images of articles may get mangled or fail to load, but this is a good option if search engine cache is unavailable.
  3. Use a VPN that is located in a country where the site is accessible. There are both free and paid VPN services. The free services generally have limited traffic and function to attract potential future paying customers, but reading some news articles doesn't use much traffic. Just don't go watching YouTube with a free VPN or you'll exceed your data cap in no time. Layout and images remain intact this way, the downside is you'll have to configure your device to use a VPN.
  4. If the Wayback Machine hasn't archived the link but you are fairly certain, for example because of the title/summary a search engine gave you, that the article will provide a useful reference, save it to the Wayback Machine and view it there. Using the Wayback Machine as a free proxy (saving many pages you don't plan to use as a reference) is not practical as there are limits and saving webpages tends to take a while. Also consider if the page you wish to save a snapshot of could ever be useful to anyone besides you. It's fine to do this for articles from any reliable source, or really any site with original content. But for a YouTube video consisting of 50 hours of Nyan Cat with 5 views made by a nobody, please don't. Use a VPN or actual proxy for that.
  5. Use the Tor Browser. This is free and will not insert ads, but it may not always work, is generally slower than a VPN or proxy and requires you to install the browser on your device.
  6. Use search engine cache. If the newspaper hasn't disallowed search engines from caching, you may be able to read the article text. The layout, text markup and images of articles may get mangled or fail to load, but this could be sufficient to create a citation. Be careful to use the original URL in your citation, not the search engine cache link!

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Websites not available in the European Union after GDPR". 2018-07-11. Retrieved 2020-08-03.
  2. ^ Jeff South (2018-08-07). "More than 1,000 U.S. news sites are still unavailable in Europe, two months after GDPR took effect". Retrieved 2020-08-03. Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. But rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have instead chosen to block European visitors to their sites.