Hi Lucy
A client raised the same incident with their production environment this morning.
We've done some investigation at our end and can see that the filter options are set up correctly, but even by us removing and reintroducing the news web part, the filtering is being ignored. The "See All" option does respect our filtering.
This doesn't seem to affect all tenants, as we've tested it on three others with no impact.
We've now raised a call with their support and await further assistance, but I suspect this will need to go to Microsoft support.