Ofcom Fines 4chan £20k and Counting for Violating Uk's Online Safety Act
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The UK's Ofcom has fined 4chan £20K for violating the Online Safety Act, sparking debate about the enforceability of the fine and the implications of extraterritorial jurisdiction.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxvnwkl5kgo
This is not a fictive fine, it's threats of imprisonment, and ignoring the whole thing means having to avoid travelling to or through the UK for life, and that's assuming the UK doesn't try to activate any sort of extradition agreements.
Even without going to prison, that's a permanent and quite significant theft of freedom of movement. If you ever travel abroad, you could end up accidentally booking a transfer through the UK.
No one ends up unintentionally transferring through Russia anytime soon. And likening the legal threats of a foreign nation to a joke from your neighbor makes no sense.
Even more unlikely is the crown exercising the kind of power you're talking about. Never mind that Charles isn't the King of the majority of Commonwealth countries.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belarus-forces-vilnius-...
The UK is a misguided democracy within the usual group of countries considered "the west", enforcing stupid and broken laws in a highly questionable fashion that presents fundamental questions about jurisdiction in the modern world.
However, it is acting against an entity is cancerous enough that even the defendent is purely challenging (and getting support on) the technical legal grounds in a search for precedent.
Imagine being a US citizen, and suddenly being banned from Texas and Utah. It's not like you were planning on visiting those, right? Just remember to never accidentally take interstate 10, 15, 20, 40, 70 or 80 when driving around, that can't be too hard.
Suggesting it is okay to have arbitrary freedoms taken away because "you wouldn't use it anyway" is a very slippery slope. Who needs privacy and free spech, not like you want to badmouth the eternal supreme leader anyway.
It also very much seems like Nishimura gives a shit by virtue of the active effort he is putting into his legal defense, consuming both time and money.
Edit: and nobody realistically could be
If an entire continent was at stake, this would be a different story. But, in the end, the UK is small in the grand scheme of things. Any website operated outside the UK won't care, and actively demonstrating this is pretty illogical from their part.
Big loss, that destination.
It would be a hassle though.
Unfortunately, I don't see any site being blocked that will make these shameless gremlins in power let go of their authoritarian control over the public's lives.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyra...
> Perhaps most troubling, the UK’s approach sets a dangerous precedent for global internet regulation. If every country can claim jurisdiction over any website accessible within its borders, the internet becomes subject to the most restrictive speech laws anywhere in the world.
Another interesting point is that the UK could just ban the websites it finds objectionable, but that'd expose them as a censor, so instead the strategy is to basically force those websites to withdraw from the market voluntarily (or comply), which is a much less revolting story to sell to its population.
First Amendment makes it hard for the government to censor or ban them outright, but onerous child protection requirements gets them to close on their own. Russ Vought:
> …you know what happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state.’ Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?
It's rather simple really; the secret is money.
Only then can you tame a politician.
Our MPs are listening to the faith-based organizations bankrolled by American interests. They are listening to the Catholic Church, the Church of England, and their equivalents in the other faiths (they all condemn "vice"). They are listening to anti-porn organizations. They are listening to "think of the children" groups. They are listening to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. They are listening to Mumsnet. They are listening to censorship-enabling companies. They are listening to anyone with money and an interest in defining power structures to further entrench themselves.
They are listening, just not to the apathetic, individualistic know-it-alls who don't engage in politics and then complain that it's all shit.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fujitsu-uk-sues-department-h...
over in the US, getting an MPAA rating is completely voluntary. MPAA rules do not allow it to refuse to rate a motion picture, and even if they did, the consequences would be the same as choosing not to get a rating.
If you don't get a rating in the US, some theatres and retailers may decline to show/sell your film, but you can always do direct sales, and/or set up private showings.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
https://politicaladvertising.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...
I love the UK in so many ways, but sometimes it makes it very hard to love.
He also has the charisma of a wet sock, which doesn't help.
If there were elections now according to the current projections Tories would get less seats than the Liberal Democrats.
4chan is also the originator of the Pepe the Frog memes, and claims (whether people believe it or not) to have meme-d Trump into the Whitehouse in 2016.
I think neither a murky ideological battle nor a decade-old debt matters much to the president. And it probably matters that the UK made a tariff deal already, so changing terms would be a big act of self-sabotage.
Because they're the only ones who are profiting from this fiasco! /s
What happens if one of the officers of 4Chan or Gab is on a flight to Paris and the plane is redirected to London? Well, they're going to prison. The UK is a police state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." -Henry Kissinger
What would those have to do with "intelligence contractor leaked our stuff, might be on the Bolivian president's plane, oh no a diplomatic incident"?
https://www.icrc.org/en/article/grave-breaches-defined-genev... GC 4 Art. 147. "Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, UNLAWFUL DEPORTATION OR TRANSFER OR CONFINEMENT OF A PROTECTED PERSON, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."
1. Foreign heads of state are definitely protected persons.
2. Foreign heads of state transiting to and from diplomatic meetings are engaged in a protected activity.
3. If these laws apply between enemy nations engaged in declared war, they are even more applicable to countries at peace with one another.
It turns out I'm even more right that I initially thought: this was not only a breach of the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, it was also a breach of the very letter of the law! Regardless, someone doesn't understand the purpose of the Geneva Conventions in the first place, so I'll elaborate...
Edward Snowden himself is irrelevant, it doesn't matter if Osama Bin Laden was on that plane. The fact is that the US and its allies used deception to illegally ground a diplomatic flight, detain a foreign head of state, and engage in an illegal search and seizure.
Furthermore, whether or not the countries involved were even at war is irrelevant. The purpose of the Geneva Conventions are to maintain a minimum set of international ethics that make diplomacy safe for diplomats. If a foreign head of state can be detained or imprisoned, and if his property can be searched or seized, then diplomatic negotiations for anything are now impossible.
It doesn't matter if the reasons for breaking these rules are justifiable or not, the fact is that you're not trustworthy even in a basic capacity that allows for diplomatic negotiation. You're in the same perfidious bucket as Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Saddam Hussein, or Ruhollah Khomeini (Iranian Hostage Crisis).
"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."
-Sun Tzu
P.S. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations explicitly forbids detaining diplomats. See articles 27 and 29:
https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventio...
YOU LOSE! YOU GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!
So far as I can tell, that claim is your own invention.
Also, according to your own link's link to the full text:
-- https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...So, not what you say.
Even if it was, Morales was not detained by another state, nor did his plane land under what is recognised as "coercion": The aircraft was denied overflight by several European states after rumours that Snowden was aboard, so it diverted to Austria, where it landed voluntarily for refuelling. Austria’s authorities requested (but, in a legal sense, did not compel) inspection; Morales, in a legal sense, consented.
Also, "search and seizure"? Nothing was seized, IIRC?
> The purpose of the Geneva Conventions are to maintain a minimum set of international ethics that make diplomacy safe for diplomats.
Nope, different laws for that. As you say elsewhere, Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Which, importantly, is a different thing than the Geneva Conventions. I mean, you can tell by how most of the words in the name are different…
> YOU LOSE! YOU GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!
I see you're new here. Such energy doesn't go down well on this site.
His plane was denied access to airspace. At worst, he would have had to turn around and reroute. They only decided to land right away because of a faulty fuel indicator.
I understand what point you're trying to make, but Protasevich would have been a better example. Beware of whose airspace you fly over.
No it isn’t.
When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress, and to consider not speaking from now on, you live in a police state. When you have banned political parties and organizations that trigger the mass arrests of peaceful protestors, you live in a police state. People who are comfortable with what is being suppressed never think of their country as a police state. At least until something happens to them or someone they care about, when they suddenly become "activists."
sigh You've not lived in a police state, or more accurately, you've been online too much to actually get context.
In the UK threatening to kill someone has been illegal since at least ~1880 something. Going online an publicly calling for the death of one or more person (which in the eyes of the law is pretty close to sending a good old paper death threat) is not only widely considered a dick move, its illegal.
Now, How do you enforce that? the police investigate, and if its deemed a credible threat, you are visited by the plod. Who most likley go "look mate, don't be a dick".
If you are really being a dick, you might be cautioned (taken to the police station and told "you're being a shit")
The next stage up is appearing in court.
And then you have to be convicted by a jury of your peers, and the burden of evidence is really quite high. ("oh but that mum, she was innocent." I advise you to read all that she wrote, you know the extra bits that the sun can't print)
Its not like you're bundled into the back of a van by masked goons who refuse to identify themselves. Taken to a mass detention centre and not seen for weeks, and then yeeted to an illegal jail.
But why are the police investigating social media?
Now thats a good question. And the answer is: Musk doesn't moderate. Stuff that gets you a visit from the plod is generally against the community standards of social media, even X.
Now to your point here: "When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress"
I've had a visit from the police, why? because I was young and being an antisocial shit. The police were not actually there to arrest me, and I don't think they could actually if they wanted to. The point was, they were there to make the town liveable for all it's citizens. I was "fucking around", and the police were gently telling me that I'd really not like to "find out".
"OH BUT PERSONAL FREEDOM". Now, the thing is, I was perfectly free to carry on my bad ways. The problem was, those ways, had they descended further, would have resulted in jail time. The choice was mine.
I don't want to live in a country where its acceptable to bully whomever I like, in the guise of personal freedom. Sure, speak your mind, but don't be a dick about it.
And I have not claimed otherwise. during the troubles stuff went south very quickly. What you are doing are conflating political persecution with the censoring of 4chan, an organisation who's adherence to law is flexible at best.
Criminal 2: "Coppers?"
Criminal 1: "Worse. Nannies."
Nah, it's not worse.
> under ___ laws.
A police state is one where the police arrest whoever the government directs them to arrest (rather than enforcing the law). Keir Starmer is not phoning up Police chiefs to get people disappeared.
I mean there isn't a UK court. There's the supreme court, but one can still appeal to the Hague to get you out of a jam. But yeah, you keep thinking that. Its not like with have a shadow docket going on, undermining the constitution.
> It's a total police state.
I can still, on record call Starmer "a massive fucking prick".
I can do that on TV.
I will not get arrested, I will not have an ICE raid called on me, I won't get death threats.
I won't lose my job[1]
So no, its not a police state, because the judiciary is still working, more or less
[1] not my current job anyway
We used to just out and out shoot them.
We used to demand that they have their voices literally overdubbed by an actor.
We used to round people up and jail them for being too irish.
We used to be in a civil war, up until the 2000s.
You're just having a cyberpunk wet dream. Don't get me wrong, the OSA is an abomination. but you are being a hyperbolic child, especially as actual authoritarianism is happening in the USA, without anything as a peep from the same blowhards talking about the OSA.
There's no such thing. There are many different processes that some people consider democratic and others don't. But "democratic" has no other meaning than rule by the governed. It is not a description of a specific political process. Especially one that bans leading opposition candidates, which is clearly as undemocratic as anything that can occur in government. If a population wants to vote in somebody who is currently in prison for crimes they are obviously guilty of, preventing them from doing it is a direct repudiation of democracy.
Even killing opposition candidates is marginally more democratic, because at least that only lasts for an instant. Saying that people cannot vote for the government of their choice is a restriction on the governed, not a restriction on people who want to govern.
The UK is further from being a police state than the USA is.
And despite what Trump has been doing, both are nowhere near being that.
I mean, UK cops aren't even routinely given firearms… and the cops themselves don't want to change that.
We don't jail people for tweets though.
https://reason.com/2025/10/10/tennessee-man-arrested-gets-2-...
> and the cops themselves don't want to change that.
I think that you will find that there is a minority of UK police who would welcome being armed with deadly weapons.
Here's an article from 2017:
"A national survey carried out by the Police Federation of England and Wales found more than a third of officers supported the idea of routinely being armed, compared to 23 per cent when the last survey was carried out in 2006.
Another 55 per cent said they would be prepared to carry a gun if asked to – up more than 10 per cent."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/armed-police...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctioned_Suicide
I would also expect to find that the effect of internet was minimal (in my case because I think the drivers of suicide are mostly socioeconomic), but I'd really like to see a proper study. I'm also aware that there is quite a lot of peer-reviewed evidence that pro-anorexia websites do actually cause harm, and there's an obvious parallel to be drawn.
SS simply says a) suicide should be your choice, b) dehumanizing people for having suicidal thoughts is bad. Sadly these opinions are so far outside the overton window that suicidal people end up having no choice but to discuss their problems with other suicidal people - likely not a good basis for improvement but the human is a social animal so I'll take it over nothing.
And although SS provides info on how you can kill yourself, it also tells you how you can't kill yourself, and that has apparently saved me from permanent liver damage. So at least for me it has been objectively beneficial - more so than the brainless repetition of "consult a professional" which seems to be the gold standard for suicide prevention these days.
I am a little surprised that you perceive a gap between the advice to "consult a professional" and your a) and b). Do professionals working in this space not accept the validity of your thoughts and feelings, as a basic step? They really should.
For whatever it's worth, I hope you choose to stay with us.
> Research from over 100 international studies provide evidence that the way suicide deaths are reported is associated with increased suicide rates and suicide attempts after reporting [6,7].
> At the same time the WHO also suggests that positive and responsible reporting of suicides which promotes help-seeking behaviour, increases awareness of suicide prevention, shares stories of individuals overcoming their suicidal thinking or promotes coping strategies can help reduce suicides and suicidal behaviour [6,7,8]
https://cmhlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Resource-2-SPIR...
He'd pop into 'law streams' from time to time to talk about cases and discuss newsworthy events out of the courts.
He is as if New Jersey was transmuted into a man (I say that with great affection).
I want to say, and I could be wrong, I became familiar with his name during the Rittenhouse trial. Or maybe the couple high profile trials after the Rittenhouse trial, that were popular while we all waited for covid to be 'over'.
For whatever that's worth
edit: he IS a real lawyer with real clients and real cases. I don't want to diminish anything because I called him a 'youtube lawyer'. I think it's more: A lawyer that sees value in being on youtube from time to time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matal_v._Tam
https://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/legal-publications-ron...
Totally separate from the issue of whether this is good or bad: it doesn't look like these Ofcom guys are playing with a full deck.
Even if the goal is just enforcement, you would get more enforcement, collect more fines, if you didn't put your ability to actually collect fines into question. When 4chan successfully defends itself and the UK extracts no money, that will show US companies which would have been in doubt, that they can also defend themselves.
I think you may be giving them too much credit. You're essentially saying that their real goal is to get an ISP block and everything they are doing now is performative to get to that real, unstated goal.
On the other hand I may be underestimating them as, to me, they just seem like power-tripping troglodytes.
How do you expect this to happen? The law is pretty clear and afaik 4chan has been pretty explicit that they know the law and they're ignoring it. 4chan's 'out' is that they don't have any legal presence in the UK. More legitimate enterprises do so the results of this will have no bearing on them.
If the company is in the UK, then yes, they are obviously screwed. The damage to the UK's web presence has already been done. I don't expect anyone would want to incorporate an internet dependent company there.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxvnwkl5kgo
Ofcom are basically the UK's Roskomnadzor. Tell them to go fuck themselves with a copy of the OSA.
I'm from the UK and would gladly fuck all of them with a copy of the OSA, but I'd rather that the law were repealed. In the meantime, I'm telling everyone how to use VPNs and Tor Browser, and to never give anyone their real identity details on the internet.
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