Britain Threatened 4chan With £18 Million and Prison. Its Lawyer Sent a Hamster

Amanda Cassatt (0:00)

You're 4chan's lawyer, why?

Preston Byrne (0:02)

It's enforcer Ofcom, it's not a law enforcement agency, it's a censorship agency. But the letters that they received threatened them with fines of up to 18 million pounds, which is an astronomical amount of money and arrests.

Amanda Cassatt (0:14)

Which could shut down the company.

Preston Byrne (0:15)

But also arrests and imprisonment up to two years.

Amanda Cassatt (0:18)

I'm Amanda Cassatt and you're watching Endgame. I think a lot of people are interested in having legal counsel that replies to Britain's internet regulator with a picture of a hamster.

Preston Byrne (0:29)

Well, that wasn't the first hamster. That was the third hamster.

Amanda Cassatt (0:32)

Is there part of this that feels personal for you for any reason?

Preston Byrne (0:35)

Because I just said to myself, this can't be the future.

Amanda Cassatt (0:41)

My guest today is Preston Byrne. He's a free speech lawyer who's representing 4chan in its fight with the British over who governs the internet. To give you a sense of the type of character Preston is, when they tried to find his client half a million pounds, he replied with a picture of a hamster.

They still haven't collected. You're watching Endgame and I'm your host Amanda Cassatt. Don't forget to like, subscribe and comment. We'd love to hear from you. Being an American lawyer, who knows who's British regulators for a living.

Preston Byrne (1:09)

I do it for fun. I did it all for free.

Amanda Cassatt (1:12)

You're 4chan's lawyer. Why?

Preston Byrne (1:13)

It needed to be done. No one else is willing to do it. They had a free speech problem with the United Kingdom, and I had already been instructed by three different American companies that had said no to British censorship orders. And so 4chan found me via contact form on my website, and they said, listen, we've got a problem too. And at the time, I was representing a bunch of companies that really couldn't afford a defense, and neither could 4chan. And so they said, we need help. And I said, sure, how can I help? And that's how it got started.

Amanda Cassatt (1:45)

So tell me more. What exactly was the problem 4chan was having, and why were they having it? Sure.

Preston Byrne (1:52)

So the United Kingdom and a bunch of other countries around the world, Australia and the European Union and its member states, started pushing online censorship laws starting at about 2018-19. And that was a reaction to two things. First, Brexit, which was regarded as being internet driven, and also the election of President Trump in 2016, which was regarded as being an internet phenomenon, particularly from 4chan itself.

And so what happened was between 2016 and 2019, we saw a lot of increased censorship on mainstream social media networks. I mean, if you recall back to 2015, then Twitter was pretty anarchic. You could find just about anything you wanted on there, and it wasn't a very tightly controlled platform, neither was Facebook or anything else. But post 2016, all of those companies started cracking down on content on their own platforms, I think partially as a response to what they saw as political demand in the United States and Europe for them to do so.

And then Europe began instituting state censorship laws, including the DSA, in the UK's case, the UK Online Safety Act. And those started to come online in late 2024 and early 2025

So the UK's regime is called the Online Safety Act. It has nothing to do with safety, it doesn't keep anybody safe from anything, it's enforced or Ofcom, it's not a law enforcement agency, it's a censorship agency. And they started rolling it out in early 2025 And the targets they picked, as their initial crop of targets, were sort of the...

They were the bad boys of the internet, right? Gab, Kiwi Farms, a mental health discussion board that was very controversial, and 4chan were among the first targets. And so basically, they decided, they were rolling out this new program. And in order to establish credibility for the program, they said, who can we pick and select is our early crop of targets, who are going to presumably either, you know, either they'll obey our edicts, and we'll show how successful this program is, or they'll do something like ignore our edicts, we will get fines against them. And we'll use that as a way to establish our credibility by saying, look, we find, you know, Gab, 100,000 pounds, and we find Kiwi Farms, 50,000 pounds, because they're so bad and all the rest of it, and they'll walk through their process, and basically demonstrate the efficacy of their enforcement procedures that had never been used before, right? They just made up this law to pull cloth and said, this is the way things are now. Now, what they didn't really understand is that those companies have seen, I mean, they've all seen this movie before, right? Every which way, and I know this because I've represented a lot of companies that tend to have a free speech emphasis, and so they've been deplatformed and various other things. And so all of these companies, only one of them was my client before this, but the others found me, right? And they said, okay, what do we do? What are our obligations? What are we required to do? What is US law? What is the position under American law in terms of what our rights are and what the cross-border enforceability of these orders are or these cross-border enforceability is? And so I advise them. I'm not going to say what the advice was, but the conclusion that every single one of these clients reached eventually was that the orders were not enforceable in the United States or were extremely unlikely to be enforceable in the United States.