ABC tried to censor the Will Smith-Chris Rock Slap, but the uncensored version was all over Twitter within minutes

The Washington Post

It took less than five minutes for David Mack, a Buzzfeed News reporter based in Sydney, Australia, to tweet an uncensored Australian TV clip of his TV set showing Smith's exchange with Rock. A minute later, former Deadspin reporter Timothy Burke, who regularly tweets out foreign clips of big American TV events from his Tampa Bay, Florida home, posted a crisp uncensored Japanese TV version. "As Sunday’s Oscars proved, some of the old rules of regulating content may have met their match in the Internet era," says The Washington Post's Kim Bellware. As Bellware explains, "broadcasts are typically disseminated as produced feeds — with commercial insertion or graphics — or a raw transmission known as a 'clean feed.'...Broadcast regulations vary by country, but the United States has a reputation for being stricter about expletives and nudity compared to Australia, France, Britain and other areas."