Britain Issues First Online Safety Fine To US Website 4chan (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0179773264
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/13/2151251/britain-issues-first-online-safety-fine-to-us-website-4chan
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/britain-issues-first-online-safety-fine-us-website-4chan-2025-10-13/
> Britain said on Monday it had [1]issued U.S. internet forum site 4chan with a $26,644 fine for failing to provide information about the risk of illegal content on its service, marking the first penalty under the new online safety regime. Media regulator Ofcom said 4chan had not responded to its request for a copy of its illegal harms risk assessment nor a second request relating to its qualifying worldwide. Ofcom said it would take action against any service which "flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act" and they should expect to face penalties.
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> The act, which is designed to protect children and vulnerable users from illegal content online, has caused tension between U.S. tech companies and Britain. Critics of the law have said it threatens free speech and targets U.S. companies. Technology minister Liz Kendall said the government "fully backed" Ofcom in taking action. "This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material," she said.
4chan and Kiwi Farms [2]filed a lawsuit in the United States against Ofcom in August, arguing that the threats and fines issued by the regulator "constitute foreign judgements that would restrict speech under U.S. law." The lawsuit claims that both entities are entirely based in the U.S., have no operations in the U.K., and therefore are not subject to its local laws.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/britain-issues-first-online-safety-fine-us-website-4chan-2025-10-13/
[2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/27/205230/4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-the-uk-over-its-age-verification-law
Re: (Score:2)
> BLOCK IT. Cowards... Its that Simple. YOU are the GOVERNMENT. You can just block it.
It also has to follow due process. Which is first a fine, then maybe later blocking if the fines are ineffective.
> Anything else is just you trying to interfere in US Politics.
YOU are interfering with UK politics by telling their government what they should do. The UK isn't asking other governments anything. Issuing a fine to a private company (a totally negligible company) isn't politics.
(not that I agree with the law)
Re: (Score:2)
Can you point at online discussions by politicians or comments by journalists that make the point that the reason for this fine is "US politics"? I'm not refusing your argument, I want to read about it in sources I could use to make myself an educated opinion.
Re: Dear UK... (Score:2)
American companies doing business in China do follow Chinese laws. Britain should just block sites they can prove broke their laws. It does not affect anyone else beyond the citizens of their country.
Re: (Score:3)
> Take whatever the hell you are degenerating into, and keep it the hell over on that side of the pond.
Step outside and smell the ICEd coffee.
The Empire is dead. (Score:4, Funny)
I'd love to see how fining companies with only virtual presence in the UK works out.
Not a lawyer, but UK law doesn't apply across the world.
Re: (Score:1)
It doesn't work but this isn't a problem. People get sentenced for murder even when they leave country. That foreign companies cannot be reached isn't an excuse for not applying the fines planned in the legal order of the country.
Same as: Maybe Iran (arbitrary example) can fine me for saying bad stuff about Iran on a forum used by Iranian citizen. I won't pay the fine, but that does not preclude the legitimacy of issuing a fine to me as an infractor of their laws (if they deem necessary to spend time and re
Re: (Score:2)
That's the problem with the law. It's politicians being seen to be doing something without really doing anything.
Re: (Score:2)
They are doing something about it: the law says blocking the site is possible. Just it's something for the future, not for this stage of the process.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah... but they have to have committed the murder in the country in the first place.
And I'd say "Well, technically someone can make a request from Britain to get a webpage from America and receive content" shouldn't be enough to constitute actually interacting with that country, any more than me farting in an American Taco Bell should result in my being fined for polluting Canada, however close to the border I might be. It's not actually that easy to provide country specific access given IP ranges change a
Re: (Score:1)
> "Well, technically someone can make a request from Britain to get a webpage from America and receive content" shouldn't be enough to constitute actually interacting with that country,
I think it is enough. "serving content" = "open for business". They don't charge the user, but that's not the question.
I would agree with you if it was a private communication between individuals, but it's a company that hosts a commercial forum. There are very clear parallels in the physical world (not all companies ship everywhere because complying with laws at destination is bothersome) and "but on the internet" isn't per se an argument.
> any more than me farting in an American Taco Bell should result in my being fined for polluting Canada, however close to the border I might be.
You are certainly right that it's WHERE you are located when you "fa
Re: (Score:3)
Websites don't "push" stuff to you unless you've requested they do so. Therefore, 4chan is being visited by people in the UK. It's not like 4chan is just magically popping up in peoples' browsers.
If the UK doesn't like the website, they can block it. Expecting a foreign website to bow down to your local government is a joke. No one is forced to go to 4chan. They choose to.
Re: (Score:1)
One thing to bear in mind that the UK isn't trying to interfere in 4chan's freedom of speech. Not with this fine, anyway.
> Media regulator Ofcom said 4chan had not responded to its request for a copy of its illegal harms risk assessment nor a second request relating to its qualifying worldwide.
The fine is apparently because they won't provide the online equivalent of a building permit. I find myself ambivalent; the OSA is a bad piece of legislation and should be amended, but it's not unreasonable to expect fo
Re: (Score:1)
> The fine is apparently because they won't provide the online equivalent of a building permi
And that's the whole problem. 4chan is not demanding any sort of "building" right in the UK. It operates in the US and maintains a presence on the international Internet. The limit of the UK's jurisdiction is to block access to it within its own borders. It has no right to impose fines or take police actin outside those borders.
Re: (Score:1)
"If they don't like it they're free to do as imgur did and make a token effort to block UK visitors."
Why should it be on them to make any effort, token or otherwise, to block UK visitors?
If I left my lawn mower in the front yard that doesn't mean the guy who stole it was in the right because I didn't make an effort to protect it from theft.
If they don't block their website and some schnook reads it who's not supposed to be there, that's on the schnook, not on the website.
Re: (Score:2)
The first thing that comes to mind is they could place the owners / operators of the website on a secret watch list for detention if they ever happen to step foot inside jurisdiction. And this could affect them for years to come. Have friends or family in the UK? You're not going to be going on vacation to visit them. Great job offer from over there? nope. Does this apply to your spouse too? How about your kids? ALL the employees of your company? They're already being unreasonable, what makes you t
Re: (Score:2)
Being a UK citizen, at the moment.
Yes, they probably would be arrested if they ever went to the UK.
They would not arrest people not at the very top of the company.
But yes, that can change,
The UK government already has the power to tell ISPs to block IP certain addresses, and for ISPs to add any addresses they may use to get around the ban.
This law is probably part one in a plan to go VPNs
Re: (Score:2)
Other countries have applied various opportunistic squeezes of that kind to exert control over Internet businesses that are outside their jurisdiction. One example was Brazil forcing X to delete the accounts of its current president's political opponents by threatening the Brazilian presences of SpaceX and Tesla, unrelated Musk-owned businesses. I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump, but I like that he whacked Brazil with punitive tariffs for taking this action. The message sent is that any tinhorn who uses suc
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It means the website goes away in the UK.
People who want to access it will use a VPN and eventually the people who passed these laws will use that to get vpns criminalized.
You need to pay close attention to who is pushing these laws. I promise you every time you look you are going to find a right winger.
The left wing is too busy trying to stop fascism and maintain human civilization to be bothered with bullshit like this. You might find the occasional centrist that gets roped into it too. Centri
Re: (Score:3)
I've seen politicians try to ban VPNs before
It's very funny watching them try to work out ways to do it that don't criminalise banking software, business operations and their own secure channels. The best they can do is tack a 'for criminal purposes' on the end, which is redundant in any jurisdiction that already has wire or carrier based laws.
America isn't very good at very much (Score:2)
But we are absolutely excellent at selective law enforcement.
We're not perfect. Every now and then a pretty white woman will get caught up in our laws attacking women's reproductive healthcare for example. And sometimes the cops will harass someone that is clearly not of the appropriate economic class for harassment.
But for the most part we are very good at building systems that punish the innocent and reward the evil. I mean we had slavery longer than anyone on the planet and segregation and Jim Cr
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> Not a lawyer, but UK law doesn't apply across the world.
No, but it does apply in the UK, and international law has always been clear that when you serve customers in a country, you do so under the laws of that country.
UK law does not apply to what is served to US customers. It applies to what is served to UK customers. And if you break UK laws, you pay UK penalties.
This has been the standard internationally since Dow Jones vs Gutnick 23 years ago (That was an australian lawsuit that settled how internationa
Make the parents responsible (Score:4, Informative)
If the entirety of the UK believes that the material is harmful, then throw parents in prison for a few decades for allowing their children to access harmful material. On then can the children be guided in the right direction under the guidance of a benevolent workhouse.
Re: (Score:3)
I'll take "Shit that didn't happen" for $2000, Alex.
"Arresting people for quietly reading the Bible in public."
Funny! "flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom" (Score:2)
Dam Right! Actual correct context for No Kings! No Kings! No Kings!
4Chan is Garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
4Chan is a terrible site, that sucks so badly it regresses all of humanity with its very existence ... but it's also the perfect poster child for "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Re: (Score:1)
kek
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe so, but judging by some of the things that will get you banned from 4chan, 4chan doesn't really care about free speech either. They seem to mostly just care about protecting their own staff and little clique of insiders' ability to be abusive.
Kiwi farms on the other hand (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just bad or even harmful speech it's a website that specializes in doxing especially of trans and queer people and then arranging for harassment campaigns with the goal of getting the target to commit suicide. The website's users have been successful more than once.
If you have ever used the bsnes emulator the author of it killed herself and kiwi farms was involved.
Not that the UK law would help any of that. Someone was successful in taking kiwi farms off the internet for a Time by going around to all the hosts and just explaining what kiwi farms was. But it looks like they are back. At one point even the hosting provider that specializes in white supremacist websites wouldn't touch them. It makes me wonder who would host the website given the potential liability risks.
There are limits after all to free speech. Then again section 230 of the CDA should protect the hosting provider from anything except boycotts and I'm not going to give up section 230 and basically the entire internet with it just to get to kiwi farms.
If we had a functioning Department of Justice though the website would just be filled with cops arresting people for harassment. Sort of like how they hang around websites used by sex workers to do the same thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Plenty of hate groups flourish on discord servers and whatsapp groups, with far easier ability to conduct and control raids real time than you ever had on a 4chan thread.
You're a naive fool to think that taking one website down will stop whatever part of the human condition it is that seeks these behaviour out. Until all the pipes are blocked and the cats are dead, there will always be another ocean to piss in.
It's easy to shut those down (Score:1)
You report them and away they go. Yeah they will crop up again but they don't get as big as kiwi farms. Kiwi farms centralized the practice of online harassment particularly online harassment for the purposes of encouraging suicide.
Centralization can bring a lot of power to evil. It's why dictators exist.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I guess you haven't viewed the many threads on /p featuring hundreds of images of 1950s and older airplanes, or exotic sports cars, or tropical flowers.
I imagine that the Sears catalogue at your house always fell open to the women's underwear pages, and not the bicyles and slot cars.
Re:Kiwi farms on the other hand (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean it was kind of hard to notice anything else what was all the organized doxing and campaigns to get quick people to commit suicide. Those kind of overwhelm any other content on the site.
It's the old Nazi bar problem. Once you start letting a few Nazis in congratulations your bar is a Nazi bar.
Re: (Score:2)
Why? The clear message over the last few months is Americans clearly don't want to defend speech they disagree with. They claim it's dangerous to society and then arrest people for saying it.
The mere fact is...the vast majority of Americans actually saw what went on; they'd forget about the first and demand it get shut down.
Re: (Score:2)
These sites just perpetuate hate and KF actually posts things knowing it will get their targets killed if the right psychopath goes looking for victims.
Re: 4Chan is Garbage (Score:3)
The worst thing is that 4chan vents what's going on in the head of some people, but they would just find other channels.
What 4chan also can be is more than what's obvious - a waterhole that can be used to attract people that the governments wants to track, just watch for political trends there.