Here’s a handy guide on how to view news sites that only allow you to see a certain number of articles before they insist that you pay for a subscription. This guide is for Android mobile devices. Now, the easiest way to view the article you want is to open it in Incognito (or similar) mode (this doesn’t always work), or to use an app to delete all cookies, but if you have reason not to delete all cookies (saved passwords, online shopping, etc), this method will give you the same results.
Step 1: If you’re on social media and you click on an article, it will open it within the app itself, and this allows the site to track you based on cookies (or something similar). If you know how to open the link in Chrome, skip to Step Two. Otherwise, the first thing you need to do is to click the three dots in the corner.
This will open a dropdown menu where you will want to select Copy Link (sometimes there’s an option to Open In Chrome, that will work too).
Step 2: Once the link is copied, open Chrome. You can actually do the rest of these steps in Chrome at any time, whether or not you have the link, but the idea is that you will open the link in Chrome, and if the paywall is still there, this is how you get rid of it. Again, click the three dots in the corner of Chrome:
In the dropdown menu for Chrome, select Settings.
In Settings, scroll down to Site Settings.
In Site Settings, open All Sites:
This will show you a list of every site that Chrome has cookies for, in alphabetical order. Select the site you want to visit. For this example, I used The Washington Post.
When you click on the site here, you will have the option to click the trashcan, or Clear And Reset. Either one should work, but I usually choose Clear And Reset.
When you click Clear And Reset, it will ask you if you are sure. Select Clear All.
At this point, the cookies no longer exist and the website doesn’t know that you’ve ever been there before. Happy reading!
Mikl Moose 