Britain Threatened 4chan With £18 Million and Prison. Its Lawyer Sent a Hamster

So tell me more.

What exactly was the problem 4chan was having, and why were they having it?

Sure.

So the United Kingdom, uh, and a bunch of other countries around the world, Australia and the European Union and its member states, uh, started pushing online censorship laws starting in about two thousand eighteen, nineteen.

And that was a reaction to two things.

First, Brexit, uh, which was regarded as being, uh, internet-driven, and also the election of President Trump in two thousand sixteen, which was regarded as being an internet phenomenon, particularly from 4chan itself.

Um, and so what happened was between two thousand sixteen and two thousand nineteen, uh, we saw a lot of increased censorship on mainstream social media networks.

I mean, if you recall back to two thousand fifteen, you know, then Twitter, uh, you know, was, was pretty anarchic.

You could see...

You could find just about anything you wanted on there, and it wasn't a very tightly controlled platform.

Neither was Facebook, uh, or anything else.

But post two thousand sixteen, all of those companies started cracking down on content on their own platforms, I think partially as a response to what they saw as political demand in the United States and Europe for them to do so.

Uh, and then Europe began, uh, instituting state censorship, uh, you know, laws, including the DSA, in the UK's case, the UK Online Safety Act, and those started to come online in late two thousand twenty-four and early two thousand twenty-five.

So the UK's regime is called the Online Safety Act.

It has nothing to do with safety.

It doesn't keep anybody safe from anything.

It's enforcer Ofcom.

It's not a law enforcement agency, it's a censorship agency.

And they started rolling it out in early twenty twenty-five, and the targets they picked as their initial crop of targets were sort of the, uh, they were, they were the bad boys of the internet, right? Gab, Kiwi Farms, uh, a mental health discussion board that was very controversial, and 4chan were among the first targets.

And so basically, they decided they were, they were rolling out this new program, and in order to establish credibility for the program, they said, "Who can we pick and select as our early crop of targets who are going to presumably either, uh, you know, either they'll obey our, our edicts and we'll show how successful this program is, or they'll do something like ignore our edicts.

We will get fines against them, and we'll use that as a, as a way to establish our credibility, uh, by saying, 'Look, we fined, you know, Gab a hundred thousand pounds, and we fined Kiwi Farms fifty thousand pounds because they're so bad,' and all the rest of it." And they'll walk through their process and basically demonstrate the efficacy of their enforcement procedures that had never been used before, right? They just made up this law out of whole cloth and said, "This is the way things are now." Now, what they didn't really understand is that those companies have seen...

I mean, they've all seen this movie before, right? Ev-every which way.

And I know this 'cause I've represented a lot of companies that, that tend to have a free speech emphasis, and so, you know, they've been deplatformed and various other things.

And so all of these companies, only one of them was my client before this, but the others found me, right? And they said, "Okay, what do we do? What are our obligations? What are we required to do? What is US law? Uh, you know, what is the position under American law in terms of what our rights are and what the cross-border enforceability of these orders are?" And, uh...

Or the cross-enfor- excuse me, cross-border enforceability is.