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The UK’s Ofcom regulator has given 4Chan until tomorrow, July 9th to pay their £594,000 ($793,878 USD) fine But how did the UK government end up in a legal battle with 4Chan on American soil? Preston Byrne said they look for backdoor ways to censor internet users:
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![When President Donald Trump met with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in July, he demanded that it not censor Americans. “I cannot imagine him [Starmer] censoring Truth Social,” said Trump about his social media platform. “I only say good things about him and his country.” In response, Starmer defended the 2023 Online Safety Act, saying “we’re not censoring anyone” and that the law is geared toward protecting children. But now Starmer’s government is, in fact, demanding censorship of Americans — and under the guise of protecting children. The UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, recently sent a series of letters to the US message board website 4chan, demanding internal records and threatening enormous penalties. Ofcom did not respond to Public's requests for comment. The action would be a violation of the First Amendment if the US government were doing it. And “UK laws don’t apply to my clients because they’re American companies,” notes 4Chan's' pro bono attorney Preston Byrne “This is a very well-established, settled legal principle here in the United States.” As such, Ofcom’s action is unprecedented and highly symbolic, since 4Chan played a foundational role in the MAGA movement and Trump’s 2016 victory. 4chan is considered an “image board,” Byrne explained, “where people post images and discuss those images. It’s been a key cornerstone of internet culture for the last fifteen years. The Anonymous movement came out of it. The Donald Trump campaign, to a large extent, started as a meme on 4chan.” This is not a story about foreign governments censoring foreigners in a far-off land. It’s about the UK government under Starmer trying to censor US citizens and a US company. “They threatened 4Chan with fines of up to eighteen million pounds or ten percent of global revenue,” said Byrne, “and up to six months’ imprisonment.” In the 2016 election, 4chan’s /pol/ board served as a launching pad for memes in support of Trump’s campaign. Its users popularized memes like “You can’t stump the Trump” and co-opted symbols such as Pepe the Frog, which were sometimes shared by Trump’s campaign. In response, Byrne has sued the British government in federal courts and provided American lawmakers with draft legislation to protect US companies from foreign governments. “They don’t accept that the US has any sovereignty of its own,” he said. “They’re telling us, ‘Listen, we think that we have the power to dictate American conduct on an American service on American soil.” Unlike Facebook, 4chan allows anonymous posting, which the First Amendment protects. “It doesn’t require users to register an account,” Byrne said. “You’re allowed to post anonymously.” That anonymity, he argues, is precisely what the UK’s new law seeks to destroy. “The Online Safety Act has age-verification requirements and content-moderation requirements,” Byrne explained in a podcast with Public, “which essentially requires every website that has a user in the United Kingdom to implement age verification, which basically means they have to ID their users. If we implement this, it destroys what 4chan is.” Britain’s Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, is the world’s most aggressive internet-speech regime. It forces every website reachable from the UK to prove it has conducted “risk assessments” on possible harms to users, to record those assessments, and to remove or restrict “harmful” content—even if that content is legal elsewhere. “The UK stood up a regime which obligates providers of online services to do things which violate the First Amendment rights of the platform and its users,” said Byrne. “People have the right to talk and speak, and communicate anonymously. It’s a core part of the First Amendment. The age-verification features are something that takes that away.” The principle, he insists, is simple: “The law of the web server is the law of the website. If a server sits in New Jersey, it’s subject to New Jersey and U.S. law—not British law. If the UK wants to block 4chan domestically, that’s their right. But you don’t get to come over to America and tell an American what he can and can’t do.” So Byrne and his co-counsel, Ron Coleman, sued Ofcom in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The result could become a strain on US-UK relations, particularly since Ofcom’s actions break the promise Starmer made to Trump in July. Why is the Starmer government doing this?](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1978907936891244684/amplify_video_thumb/1978906685801402368/img/-sv1eMHwX0Nwaagf.jpg)
