When Trolls Take On Tyrants: 4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK Over Extraterritorial Censorship

from the we-fought-a-war-over-this-nonsense dept

Let’s be clear upfront: 4chan and Kiwi Farms are not the heroes of internet freedom. Both sites are notorious cesspools that have enabled harassment campaigns, doxxing, and some genuinely awful behavior over the years. They’re the kinds of places where maladjusted people gather to egg each other on toward increasingly toxic actions. Most reasonable people wouldn’t shed a tear if they disappeared tomorrow.

But here’s the thing about free speech principles: they’re not just for the speech you like. And when it comes to the UK’s disastrous Online Safety Act, even trolls can make valid constitutional points.

Last week, the two sites teamed up to file a lawsuit in US federal court against Ofcom, the UK agency in charge of regulating internet speech under the OSA, claiming the regulator’s attempts to enforce British law against wholly American companies violate their constitutional rights. The case highlights the fundamental absurdity of the UK’s approach to internet regulation—and raises serious questions about what happens when every country decides it can regulate the global internet.

The Complaint: A Surprisingly Coherent Constitutional Challenge

The 22-page complaint, filed in Washington D.C., doesn’t mince words about what Ofcom has been up to. According to the filing, Ofcom has been sending “legally binding information notices” to both sites demanding they comply with UK law, despite having no operations, infrastructure, or legal presence in Britain beyond being accessible to UK internet users.

The lawsuit opens with a pointed historical reminder:

Delaware was a colony of the Kingdom of Great Britain until the Assembly of the Lower Counties of Pennsylvania that declared itself independent of British authority on June 15, 1776, thereby creating the state of Delaware. Delaware subsequently was the first state to ratify the Declaration of Independence, the instrument which created the United States of America, on July 4, 1776. Under the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the Kingdom of Great Britain officially acknowledged the United States as a sovereign and independent nation.

The subtext is unmistakable: we fought a war 250 years ago to get out from under British regulatory authority, and we’re not going back now.

The lawsuit describes Ofcom’s approach in stark terms:

In fact, Ofcom’s conception of “keeping users safe” is keeping them “safe” from encountering points of view of which Ofcom disapproves. Ofcom purports to regulate content and interactions on platforms and services with which Plaintiffs’ users are voluntarily interacting. Ofcom seeks to control those interactions in order to satisfy the whims of Ofcom employees or the UK law enforcement or political apparatuses.

The complaint notes something particularly telling about Ofcom’s enforcement priorities:

On information and belief, most of the “online services” Ofcom intends to regulate, are based not in the United Kingdom, but in the United States. All four of Ofcom’s first social media enforcement targets, being SaSu, Gab, Kiwi Farms, and 4chan, are American.

That’s worth pausing on. Ofcom’s first round of enforcement actions targeted exclusively American websites. One can argue that these four sites (the other two, SaSu—or Sanctioned Suicide—and Gab are also among the most controversial websites on the internet) can be seen as particularly problematic, but this sure does feel like an effort by the UK to regulate American companies.

The Threats: Fines, Jail Time, and Bureaucratic Intimidation

The specific demands Ofcom has made are both breathtaking in their scope and chilling in their implications. According to the lawsuit, Ofcom has threatened both sites with:

civil fines, criminal charges, criminal fines, 6 months’ imprisonment when tried summarily, or even imprisonment for up to two years when tried on indictment.

For 4chan specifically, the threats escalated over several months. The complaint details a series of increasingly aggressive communications:

On April 14, 2025, Ofcom sent a so-called “legally binding information notice” to 4chan… The 4chan Information Notice stated that failure to comply with it “may also constitute a criminal offence” and that failure to provide the requested information in readable form to Ofcom “may result in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, arrest, and/or imprisonment for a term of up to two years, or a fine (or both).”

When 4chan didn’t respond, Ofcom doubled down:

On April 30, 2025, Ofcom sent a second letter to 4chan…. The 4chan Failure to Respond to Information Notice Letter stated that 4chan was required to comply with the 4chan Information Notice, threatened a penalty of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide revenue, whichever is greater, and advised 4chan that failing to comply with the 4chan Information Notice was a criminal offense

And again:

On June 9, 2025, 4chan received a letter from Ofcom in which Ofcom advised 4chan that it intended to open an investigation into 4chan for suspected violations of “illegal content risk assessment duties,” “safety duties about illegal content,” “record-keeping and review duties,” and “Section 102(8) duties about information notices.”

And again:

On June 16, 2025, Ofcom sent 4chan a so-called “final legal notice”…. The 4chan Final Legal Notice stated that “failure to comply” with it “may also constitute a criminal offence” and that failure to provide the requested information in readable form to Ofcom may result in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, “imprisonment for a term of up to two years, or a fine (or both).”

And again (suggesting the “final” legal notice wasn’t so final):

On July 9, 2025, Ofcom sent 4chan an e-mail (the “4chan Preliminary Contravention Email”) stating its displeasure with the fact that 4chan had not responded to its prior correspondence “regarding 4chan Community Support LLC’s compliance with the duties in section 9(2) (illegal content risk assessment), 10 (illegal content safety duties), 23 (record keeping) and 102(8) (compliance with information notices) of the Online Safety Act 2023.”

And again:

On August 12, Ofcom sent a 33-page-long so-called “Provisional Decision notice”… threatened to impose a fine of £20,000 (twenty thousand pounds Sterling) on 4chan Community Support LLC, as well as daily fines of £100 (one hundred pounds Sterling) daily for noncompliance for up to a maximum of sixty days.

What’s particularly striking about this escalation is both its relentlessness and its procedural irregularity. The lawsuit notes that none of these demands were served through proper international legal processes:

None of these actions constitutes valid service under the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, United States law or any other proper international legal process.

For perspective, that’s threats of millions in fines and potential jail time for American citizens running American websites that happen to be accessible in the UK—all delivered via email rather than through established diplomatic channels.

The Constitutional Claims:

While the plaintiffs may be unsympathetic, their constitutional arguments make sense. The lawsuit raises several compelling claims:

First Amendment Violations: The complaint argues that UK demands would force the sites to remove content that is clearly protected speech under the U.S. Constitution. As they note:

Sections 9, 10, 12, 13, 23, 59, 100, 102, 113, and 179 of the OSA, taken individually and together… purport to compel U.S. website operators to express, or oblige U.S. website operators to censor, speech in a manner contrary to the protections of the Constitution of the United States.

The complaint gets specific about how this would work in practice. For instance, it notes that Section 179 of the OSA creates what amounts to a criminal defamation law—exactly the kind of restriction on speech that the First Amendment was designed to prevent:

Section 179 of the Online Safety Act, “the false communications offence,” makes it a criminal offense to send information which the sender knows to be false if, at the time of sending that message, the person intended the message to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience, and the person had no reasonable excuse for sending that message.

As the plaintiffs note, “Defamation crimes such as Section 179 of the OSA, including the historical crime of seditious libel, were permanently abolished in the United States when the First Amendment of the United States Constitution was ratified on December 15, 1791.”

Fourth and Fifth Amendment Issues: The law would require the sites to conduct “risk assessments” and provide information to Ofcom on demand, potentially including self-incriminating information, without proper legal process. This mirrors problems courts have found with similar laws in the US, where mandatory “risk assessments” have been struck down as unconstitutionally compelled speech.

Section 230 Conflicts: The lawsuit argues that Ofcom’s demands directly conflict with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:

Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act immunizes providers of interactive computer services from liability for content created by their users, but Ofcom’s demands would impose such liability on the Plaintiffs by treating Plaintiffs as the “publisher or speaker” of their users’ speech

Of course, the first argument in response to this is that the Constitution and the laws of the US (like Section 230) only apply… in the US. And Ofcom’s obvious response is that even if they’re targeting American companies, they’re trying to protect UK users.

But this creates a fascinating jurisdictional puzzle. Yes, the Constitution and Section 230 only apply within the United States. But what happens when a foreign government tries to force American companies to violate American law to comply with foreign law? The complaint argues that this goes beyond normal conflicts of law into the realm of constitutional violation:

Ofcom’s notices and demands to 4chan… to the extent that they pertain to speech proscribed by Section 179 of the OSA, constitute foreign judgments that would restrict speech protected under U.S. law including under, e.g. the SPEECH Act, 28 USCS § 4101.

The Sovereign Immunity Problem: A Legal Long Shot

Here’s where the lawsuit gets legally interesting—and potentially problematic. Normally, you can’t sue a foreign government in U.S. courts because of sovereign immunity. But the plaintiffs argue Ofcom isn’t entitled to that protection for two reasons.

First, they claim Ofcom isn’t really a government entity:

Ofcom describes itself as “independent of government and the companies we regulate.”

Ofcom also says, of itself, that “Ofcom is not funded directly by taxpayers or the Government. Most of Ofcom’s funding comes from fees paid to us by the companies we regulate, to cover the cost of the work we do in their sectors.”

Ofcom is a private corporation that acts as an official censor of the British state even through it is not an instrumentality of the British state and not entitled to sovereign immunity under 28 USCS § 1604.

Second, they argue that even if Ofcom is considered a government entity, its activities constitute “commercial activity” that falls outside sovereign immunity protections:

If the Court determines that Ofcom is an instrumentality of the UK, then Ofcom’s activities constitute “commercial activity” carried on in the United States under 28 USCS § 1605(a)(2), and Ofcom is not immune from the jurisdiction of the courts of the United States for such activity. Therefore, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act would not bar this suit regardless of whether Ofcom is viewed as a corporation or as a state actor.

This is clever lawyering, but it’s also likely a reach. Courts are generally reluctant to find that foreign regulatory agencies aren’t entitled to sovereign immunity, even when they’re funded through fees rather than taxes. The argument that Ofcom is a private “enterprise” rather than a government entity feels like a stretch—most regulatory agencies worldwide operate with some degree of independence and industry funding without losing their governmental character. And even it’s backup claim feels unlikely to succeed. The commercial activity exception is narrow, and regulatory enforcement—even aggressive regulatory enforcement—typically doesn’t qualify.

The Bigger Picture: Extraterritorial Overreach

But even if this particular lawsuit faces long odds, it highlights a fundamental problem with the UK’s approach. The Online Safety Act essentially claims that any website accessible in the UK must comply with UK law, regardless of where it’s based or operated.

This is both practically unworkable and constitutionally problematic.

If Ofcom truly believes these sites are violating UK law and causing harm to UK users, there’s a straightforward remedy available: ban the sites. All of this effort seems to be because the UK is too afraid to take that step which makes it clear that they’re the censors. The UK could certainly move to require ISPs to block access to foreign websites that violate UK law. But that’s a big step, and one that shows who is really creating the problem.

That approach would be transparent about who is making the censorship decision and would avoid the jurisdictional mess of trying to regulate foreign companies.

Instead, Ofcom is trying to use the threat of massive fines and even criminal liability to force compliance with UK law by American companies that have no presence in the UK.

The Real Victims: Small Sites and Innovation

While 4chan and Kiwi Farms might survive this regulatory assault (or simply ignore it), the real victims of laws like the OSA are going to be smaller, more sympathetic websites. As we’ve already seen, numerous small forums and communities have shut down rather than deal with the compliance costs and legal uncertainty.

That’s the real tragedy of laws like the OSA. They don’t actually stop the worst actors—they just make it impossible for small, innovative, or non-commercial sites to operate.

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.

We’re already seeing this play out. The EU’s Digital Services Act takes a similar approach. Various U.S. states are passing laws claiming authority over social media companies wherever they’re based. Australia just passed a law banning social media for minors that would apply to foreign companies.

The result is a regulatory free-for-all where websites face potentially conflicting legal demands from dozens of different jurisdictions, each claiming sole authority over global communications infrastructure.

Not Heroes, But Not Wrong Either

To be absolutely clear: this lawsuit doesn’t make 4chan and Kiwi Farms sympathetic figures. Both sites have enabled genuinely harmful behavior, and the internet would probably be a better place without them.

But on the narrow legal and constitutional questions at stake, they’re not wrong. The UK’s attempt to regulate American websites through threats of fines and imprisonment raises serious First Amendment concerns. The extraterritorial application of the Online Safety Act represents significant regulatory overreach.

More importantly, if we don’t push back against this kind of jurisdictional overreach when it targets unsympathetic defendants, we’ll have no grounds to complain when it inevitably targets more deserving ones.

The internet was designed to route around censorship. Laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act represent an attempt to make that impossible by giving every government veto power over global communications. That’s a future we should all be concerned about—regardless of what we think about the particular websites fighting it today.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, free speech, jurisdiction, ofcom, online safety act, uk
Companies: 4chan, kiwi farms