Labour 'doesn't understand the internet', tech giant 4chan’s lawyer tells LBC
Ofcom has issued almost £5.5m of fines to companies that have failed to comply with the Online Safety Act.
The UK government “doesn’t understand the internet” and has therefore set its watchdog an “impossible task” in attempting to regulate US tech firms, a lawyer representing the controversial platform 4chan has told LBC.
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In March, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, issued a fine of £520,000 to 4chan for failing to comply with sections of the Online Safety Act, which established a series of responsibilities that companies must meet to keep children safe on their platforms.
The penalty consisted of £450,000 for failing to implement age checks to stop children viewing pornography, £50,000 for not assessing the risk of illegal content on the site, and an additional £20,000 for not submitting a plan to Ofcom outlining how it would protect users from such content.
Yet 4chan, the image-based online message board, has flatly refused to entertain the fine, citing protections under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Hitting back at the sanctions, Preston Byrne, the site’s lawyer, told LBC: “4chan's position is very simple… The United States affords 4chan certain rights. Among those rights is a very robust right to freedom of speech.
We've fined 4chan £450,000 for not having age checks in place to prevent children seeing porn on its site.
— Ofcom (@Ofcom) March 19, 2026
The Online Safety Act is concerned with protecting people in the UK. It doesn't require platforms to restrict what people in other countries see.
🔗https://t.co/m2QUapVHjv pic.twitter.com/9rba57bHiq
“What the UK is trying to do over— is to override 4chan's free speech rights in the United States. And bluntly, that's not something that 4chan has to consent to, and it declines to consent to it.
“The UK just isn't getting the memo that the United States has a different system and we do things in a different way.”
When Ofcom approached 4chan to demand payment for the fine, Byrne responded by sending an image of an AI-generated animated hamster.
Byrne insists this was not intended as a mark of disrespect, explaining that it is a joke among lawyers in the United States that papers that are not properly served are as “legally effective as hamster bedding”.
In a special edition of Call the Cabinet marking the announcement of the government’s under-16 social media ban, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that she has asked Ofcom for an urgent review of its enforcement process.
The regulator has issued almost £5.5m of fines to companies which have failed to comply with the Online Safety Act, but Ofcom has been unable to confirm whether it has recouped any more than the £55,000 paid by Itai Tech.
Kendall agreed that 4chan’s conduct suggested they were “laughing” at the watchdog, saying that Ofcom “need[s] to do more” to enforce the powers it now has to keep children safe online, including by fining sites up to 10% of their global turnover.
However, Byrne believes that Ofcom faces an “impossible task”.
“I think that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the United Kingdom about how the internet works,” he argues. “[The government] had really had high hopes for what the Online Safety Act was going to do, and they framed it as a global regulation.”
“Ofcom is carrying out the mission that Parliament gave it to do. I think Parliament has given it an impossible task - that's on Parliament, not Ofcom.
“They said, ‘Well, you've ignored the Online Safety Act - you've ignored British law.’ Our response to that is [that] British law is not the only law in the world, and the United Kingdom, at the moment, is ignoring American law, and it's ignoring the U.S. Constitution.”
The Trump administration has criticised the government’s proposals to further regulate US tech companies, including social media giants such as Meta and X.
Prior to the prime minister’s announcement on Monday, the US embassy in London published its submission to the government’s consultation on the ban on social media for under-16s.
In its statement, the White House cautioned against “prescribed one-size-fits-all government restrictions” and “blunt regulatory instruments” to address online harms affecting children.
Sir Keir Starmer, however, insisted that the time had come to draw “a line in the sand” and that “tech giants had their chance and failed” to introduce measures that would properly protect children.
A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “This ban will work through a range of strong, robust age checks, where we’re learning from the model in Australia and will go further with more effective age assurance methods to make it far harder for children to get round safeguards.
“As the Technology Secretary said, Ofcom will be ready to take enforcement action if companies are found to be breaching their responsibilities and they will receive the funding it needs to enforce this.
“Platforms will be legally responsible for putting these in place and ensuring they take every necessary step to comply with the new rules.”