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4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches

bbc.com

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US messageboard 4Chan mocks £520,000 fine for UK online safety breaches

2 days ago

Zoe KleinmanTechnology editor

Getty Images The 4chan logo displayed on a phone screen. It is four concentric green hearts, similar to a four-leaf clover. Getty Images

The UK online safety regulator Ofcom has fined the US messaging platform 4Chan a total of £520,000 for failing to comply with various aspects of the Online Safety Act.

It includes £450,000 for failing to put in age checks to prevent children from seeing pornography on the platform.

However, a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.

In a follow-up post on X, 4Chan's lawyer Preston Byrne wrote: "In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."

The fines also include £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published and a further £20,000 for failing to set out how it protects users from criminal content.

4Chan has refused to pay all previous fines from Ofcom.

Ofcom responded to the BBC's request for a reply to Byrne's posts with a statement from Suzanne Cater, its director of enforcement.

"Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said.

"The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."

She did not comment on the image 4Chan had published in response to the fine.

Preston & Byrne An AI-generated picture of a giant cartoon hamster in a green mock-Godzilla costume, holding a peanut. Clear blue sky can be seen beyond it. Preston & Byrne

The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom

In February 2025 Vice President JD Vance told an audience of world leaders at the AI Summit in Paris that the administration was "growing tired" of foreign countries attempting to regulate its tech businesses.

4chan is known to be an anarchic messaging space, and has often been at the heart of online controversies since it launched 22 years ago.

Ofcom has issued nearly £3m in fines to tech companies around the world for breaches of the UK's online safety laws.

However most of this money has not yet been received.

It added that other fines were still within their timeframe to be paid, and it was "considering next steps" for those who had missed payment deadlines.

In December the regulator told the BBC it had never heard from a company running 18 porn sites, which it had fined £1m, although the company did later add age verification to its platforms.

Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%.

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defrost•1 day ago

They'll likely skate over the current turbulence that's already hitting many non-China countries.

China has been preparing for a global energy crisis for years. It is paying off now

  As other Asian economies race to conserve energy, China has huge reserves of oil and gas as well as alternative energy sources like wind and solar

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/20/china-oil-rese...

stinkbeetle•1 day ago

> Like I said, it is a spectrum.

No it really isn't.

> You draw the line at physical violence, an entirely arbitrary line, whereas the U.K. goes further and continues to emotional violence.

It must appear as a spectrum to you because you've been taken in by propaganda used by authoritarians and fundamentalists to justify using actual violence and censorship to crush dissent and criticism.

There is no such thing as emotional violence. It's hurt feelings. There is no "before" about it, and we don't need to agree on anything, you're just wrong.

> And before you argue that there is no such thing as emotional violence: do you agree that some emotional harm can be worse than some physical harm? I'd much rather be punched than subjected to the worst emotional trauma I've experienced in my life.

Non sequitur.

A society where people are reliant on the government to protect them from having their feelings hurt by hearing other people's opinions is not a good or sustainable one.

The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted, which is a hallmark of these kinds of authoritarian laws. People whose thoughts and opinions are considered verboten or threatening to the regime I'm sure have little or no protection of their feelings and sensibilities when they are insulted by other people's opinions and comments.

> I'm not going to defend U.K. laws but it is patently absurd to say something like this is in the context of a conversation about U.S. vs. U.K. free speech laws when the U.S. courts allow schools to ban certain books because of "protecting feelings of people who could just choose to not read, listen, or get themselves worked up about it". Heaven forbid a Florida student learns about homosexuality, won't anyone think of the parents?

I don't know what point you are trying to make here or if you know what freedom of speech is. Government schools and government education bureaucrats developing policies about curriculum and teaching materials doesn't seem to offer useful commentary about freedom of speech, so I really don't know how to respond to your question.

3rodents•about 24 hours ago

Again, you're drawing an entirely arbitrary line between physical violence and "hurt feelings". You're reducing speech to just "other people's opinions" but as the U.S. courts have held many times, speech isn't just opinions.

> The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted

Unlike all other laws? Tell me, who is more likely to end up on death row? To be prosecuted for drug possession? How much jail time is a rich white student likely to receive for rape compared to a poor black student? All laws are selectively enforced and prosecuted.

> I don't know what point you are trying to make here or if you know what freedom of speech is. Government schools and government education bureaucrats developing policies about curriculum and teaching materials doesn't seem to offer useful commentary about freedom of speech, so I really don't know how to respond to your question.

You don't understand that Florida schools banning books because they contain references to homosexuality is a free speech issue? Judge Carlos E. Mendoza in Penguin Random House v. Gibson said "The state’s prohibition of material that ‘describes sexual conduct’ is overbroad and unconstitutional.”. Unfortunately, many other judges did not rule the same way.

The point is that the "free speech" you lord over other countries is arbitrary, those who proclaim the U.S. to have true free speech and countries like the U.K. to be oppressive anti free speech regimes are delusional and have been conned by U.S. exceptionalism.

You can disagree with another county's choice to draw the line somewhere other than where the U.S. draws it but to proclaim the U.S. has real free speech that stands alone from other countries is lying to yourself. What, exactly, is unique about the U.S. free speech laws? That it is a constitutional amendment?

We could debate where the line should be, whether the U.K. or the U.S. has it right or wrong, but to argue that the U.K.'s laws are somehow distinct from the U.S. laws is nonsensical. I do not agree with where the U.K. draws the line. I also do not agree with where the U.S. draws the line.

> It must appear as a spectrum to you because you've been taken in by propaganda used by authoritarians and fundamentalists to justify using actual violence and censorship to crush dissent and criticism.

And for one last final point: how many protestors has the U.S. government killed this year? How many protestors have been killed by the U.K. government for protesting against government policy? I'm sure Renée Good and Alex Pretti and all the other murdered U.S. protestors are comforted in their graves by the glorious anti-authoritarian pro-dissent free speech laws that protected their dissent and protest so well.

stinkbeetle•about 21 hours ago

> Again, you're drawing an entirely arbitrary line between physical violence and "hurt feelings". You're reducing speech to just "other people's opinions" but as the U.S. courts have held many times, speech isn't just opinions.

It's not an arbitrary line. It's the definition being discussed. It's not a "spectrum", it's not a "slope". The line drawn is the line.

> > The other thing is that I guarantee you this is totally selectively enforced and prosecuted

> Unlike all other laws?

In an authoritarian regime like the UK no doubt they also selectively enforce and prosecute other crimes, you're right about that. But absolutely the threshold to meet these kind of ludicrous statues is so arbitrary it's laughable, a bureaucrat or law enforcement agent for the state can just make things up as they go really.

> You don't understand that Florida schools banning books because they contain references to homosexuality is a free speech issue? Judge Carlos E. Mendoza in Penguin Random House v. Gibson said "The state’s prohibition of material that ‘describes sexual conduct’ is overbroad and unconstitutional.”. Unfortunately, many other judges did not rule the same way.

I don't think government agents and lawmakers setting curriculum and teaching materials for government schools is a freedom of speech issue, no.

> The point is that the "free speech" you lord over other countries is arbitrary, those who proclaim the U.S. to have true free speech and countries like the U.K. to be oppressive anti free speech regimes are delusional and have been conned by U.S. exceptionalism.

Just repeating that it's arbitrary doesn't make your case, sadly.

> You can disagree with another county's choice to draw the line somewhere other than where the U.S. draws it but to proclaim the U.S. has real free speech that stands alone from other countries is lying to yourself. What, exactly, is unique about the U.S. free speech laws? That it is a constitutional amendment?

I don't know about unique, but I know the state can not easily intimidate, bully, censor, and prosecute you for posting your thoughts online under the pretense that it might hurt peoples' feelings. Unlike the UK, for example.

> We could debate where the line should be, whether the U.K. or the U.S. has it right or wrong, but to argue that the U.K.'s laws are somehow distinct from the U.S. laws is nonsensical. I do not agree with where the U.K. draws the line. I also do not agree with where the U.S. draws the line.

Why are the British so angry when confronted by the fact that they do not have freedom of speech, then in the next sentence go on to talk about how great it is their government protects their feelings from being hurt by hearing what other people in their country (and even around the world) think? It's bizarre. It's a phrase that has long been understood around the world to be American style freedom of speech, i.e., that the state should not have the power to censor or prosecute its people for speech. UK does not have it.

"You can say what you want as long as the government does not decide it might offend somebody" is not freedom of speech. If that is what you think freedom of speech is, then North Korea and Pakistan have it.

Simply bizarre.

> And for one last final point: how many protestors has the U.S. government killed this year? How many protestors have been killed by the U.K. government for protesting against government policy? I'm sure Renée Good and Alex Pretti and all the other murdered U.S. protestors are comforted in their graves by the glorious anti-authoritarian pro-dissent free speech laws that protected their dissent and protest so well.

This isn't an argument because my claim isn't that US is not authoritarian nor that it never violates the rights of its citizens.

A more relevant question would be, how many people have the countries arrested and prosecuted for what they have said or written? And the answer for USA quite well might be non-zero because all governments are by nature corrupt and power-hungry and will violate the rights of their citizens to maintain the power of their regime, as is obviously the case in the UK. The US government is not fundamentally different in that regard, but the staggering difference in the rate of such cases shows that in the US it has been much more difficult for the government to do this.

The US government is still authoritarian and thirsts to take rights from its citizens, and has -- rights to privacy/unreasonable search/seizure, rights to arms, have been flagrantly violated. So has freedom of speech for that matter as leaks like the Twitter files have exposed, but at least for now those cases are still considered wrongdoing by the government and the people often have recourse with government courts, which is why I would say it still generally has freedom of speech.

The UK simply doesn't. It doesn't even pretend it does (except to just claiming freedom of speech means something it doesn't).