4Chan's Battle to Stop the UK From Censoring the Global Internet

My job is to defend their civil rights because if their civil rights can be taken away, then so can the civil rights of every other American citizen. A few months ago, the UK's Online Safety Act went into effect, causing absolute chaos across the internet. Overnight, UK regulators blocked internet users' access from everything to Spotify playlists to SpongeBob SquarePants GIFs. Information about things like Joe Biden's police funding plan was restricted, along with posts about an up-and-coming political party in the UK. Police violence videos were wiped from the internet. the subreddit for war crimes was blocked, and dozens of forums for everything from new motherhood advice to Alcoholics Anonymous treatment was blocked. The Online Safety Act even prevented gamers from tweaking colors in games like Minecraft without uploading their government ID. While the big tech companies rolled over and complied with the law, a small but unlikely group of platforms is fighting back. These platforms include Kiwi Farms, Gab, and 4chan, and they're waging a legal battle that could reshape the entire global internet. Preston Byrne is a lawyer representing these platforms in their fight against the UK government. A fierce free speech defender, Preston is making the case that UK and EU regulators do not have the legal right to censor the speech of Americans in America. Today, he's joining me to discuss the global battle he's undertaken and how some of the worst websites online might just save the internet for all of us. Preston, welcome. Thanks, great to be here. Okay, I'm so excited to talk to you. Longtime follower online. I don't know how I found your Twitter account, but I feel like everything you post, I'm like, yes, retweet, retweet. You are such a fierce defender of free speech. So can you tell me a little bit about kind of how you got involved in this world of like international free speech defense? And like, where did this all begin? This sort of battle between, I guess, these American tech companies and these foreign governments in Europe, especially? Yeah, sure. So the fight began in some really dark and strange corners of the Internet after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. So when that occurred, there was there was kind of a great reckoning in the sort of middle and left of American society. And that's really where a lot of the censorship came from, to be blunt, because back in 2015, 16, the Internet was a very anarchic place. And so what happened was they started trying to regulate all kinds of online platforms. So you saw an increase in content moderation to companies like Meta, then Facebook, Twitter, now X, Google, Microsoft, et cetera. I always had an interest in free speech. When I was a lawyer in England, I've been a lawyer in England since 2011. And so over there, I was very interested in the topic. And then I moved back to America and I saw that the censorship that was very much a rising tide in the UK was also a rising tide in the United States. So I started representing smaller companies that had problems with the US government and also with deplatforming around 2018. And I've been tracking that issue for since before then. One company in particular, Gab.com, which was sort of the bet noir of the American online safety and trust and safety community. They started getting inbound from the German government, specifically the German Ministry for Justice, the BFJ. And the BFJ was trying to enforce a law which was kind of a predecessor to the EU Digital Services Act called the Network Enforcement Act or the NETS-DG. And so they usually only targeted big companies. So they went after Google, Facebook, whatever else. And at the time, Gab had almost no users. It had something like 500,000 registered users, maybe 15,000 MAUs. And they got a letter from the BFJ saying, oh, you need to come over here. You need to set up a registered office and you need to start following German censorship law. And if you don't do that, we're going to fine you 30,000 euros because we have global jurisdiction over the Internet. And Gap told them to go to hell, to be blunt. And the Biden administration was actually assisting the German government in serving those notices. Initially, actually under Trump won, that was happening just as a matter of course. Then under the Biden administration, you know, I got involved and we started pushing back on those notices a little bit, asking the DOJ to not serve them because it was it was violating my clients constitutional rights. And then when Trump, too, came around, we called up the House of Representatives and a couple of people in the DOJ. We let them know this was happening. And lo and behold, the notices from Germany stopped getting served. So this is something which is which has really only been a problem for a handful of the most controversial American companies. And what happened was you saw it being prototyped with the NETS-DG. The NETS-DG was not a very successful global regulatory regime for the Internet. It was not widely adopted. It's since been largely superseded by the EU Digital Services Act. But that was their experimentation lab where they tried some of these things out. And so we knew from that process. And in fact, I know we can talk about that in a second, but I now represent all of the American targets of the UK Online Safety Act. And we told them, we said, listen, you know, thanks for sending your enforcement notices. I know you're new to this, but this isn't our first rodeo. We've seen this movie before. And last time the Germans tried to do this, we just kind of dismissed them and they never got into the United States and neither will you. You know, you mentioned 2018 is when this first started. I feel like this is when you started to see a lot of moral panic, especially in the media over speech, where when you started out, it was like you would report on these platforms and that then you started to get all this like, I don't know, I don't want to say pressure, but I feel like the media sentiment changed. You saw the beginning of the tech clash and there was just a huge amount of public desire for articles about sort of like, look at this bad stuff. There's the misinformation crisis. Like we need to censor the internet and sort of, I guess, curtail speech online because otherwise we'll get Russian disinformation or something on Facebook. But I feel like a lot of it didn't pick up in the EU until like more recent years. You know, the Online Safety Act, I guess, passed in 2023, but went into effect in 2024. Can you talk about like when the Online Safety Act went into effect in the UK recently, kind of how that affected speech on these American social platforms? Sure. So the Online Safety Act started out as the online harms bill in 2019. And then I think they ran some linguistic analysis on the name and decided they didn't want to call it online harms. So they called it online safety because that was better packaging for it. The Online Safety Act really requires companies to do three essential things. One of them is it requires them to produce risk assessments of content on their site and assess their compliance with the substantive provisions of the Act and then report to the regulator on how they've complied, what the chief risks are, and how they plan on ameliorating those risks. That includes all kinds of subsidiary requirements, like if they make a substantial change to the design of the application, they need to report that to the regulator and do a risk assessment on the change. The second thing is that it requires proactive removal of so-called priority illegal content, which includes things like CSAM and other stuff that is also illegal in the United States, but also includes things that are perfectly legal in the United States, particularly under their terrorism statutes. And the third thing it does then says, OK, well, in addition to that, you have to on a notice and takedown basis, remove any content which is illegal, violates any real world law, which is not the case in the United States, covers a great deal of constitutionally protected content and also infringes on these companies rights as distributors of third party content to not be held liable for that content, which is both a First Amendment principle under Smith v. California, but it's also a statutory principle under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It doesn't give the regulator power to intrude and actually demand that these things get taken down. But what happens is if you are in violation enough, what it does is the regulator says you violated some amorphous duty that we have imposed on you through our regulations and codes of practice that are promulgated under the act. And as a consequence of that, you have to pay hefty fines and penalties. Or if you just don't respond to us, as my clients haven't, we could throw you in prison over it because you failed to respond to our regulatory inquiries. So what we've seen is that companies have overcorrected, right? In the sense that they know, in order to avoid this fine, what they've done is they've cut off access to all kinds of lawful speech for adults. And so Substack, for example, has put up age verification technology on, I mean, Substack, I've never read anything offensive on Substack in my entire life. And they have to put up age gating, right, on content that might be offensive to someone who's under the age of 18 because it deals with touchy political subject matter. And so that infringes on the First Amendment in two ways. One of them, it infringes on the British people's God-given right to free speech, right? But the UK has the right to do what it wants within its own borders. But it infringes on American speech because it requires Americans to account for their editorial decisions to the UK. And in addition to that, it requires them to put in place barriers that prevent them and other Americans from talking to the UK. And the UK is free to do what it wants within its own borders. They can put a censorship box on the pipes leading into the country and on the tubes, right? And they can say, listen, we're going to block URLs that we find objectionable or block domains that we find objectionable. But what they don't have a right to do is to come over to the United States and tell an American what server configurations they need to set on their servers. And that's exactly what they're doing. So essentially, if you talk to someone in the UK about it, they say, well, they're operating in the UK if their website is accessible here. And that's just not congruent with what traditionally has been understood as operating in a place, right, actually means, which usually means premises, equipment, people, that kind of stuff. What the UK is saying is if your website is visible in the UK, right, which every website is as long as you've got an Internet connection, then you have to follow their content moderation rules. And essentially that means that their expectation, as they've put in lots and lots of different correspondence that they've sent and is stated in the law itself, is that these rules have extraterritorial effect and it governs the conduct of American citizens on American soil. So can you explain the difference between that and all these other countries that are also very censorious? Like you'll see a lot of people I saw on Twitter of them being like, well, what about like Iran or Russia or some of these other countries, I guess, that have very authoritarian control over speech? Why is the Online Safety Act in the UK such a problem? but the sort of authoritarian laws in those other countries are not. I mean, they are a problem, right, for people in Russia. The problem is the UK is making it a problem for people in the United States. And so you know Russia has not ever threatened any of my clients with prison time for exercising their First Amendment rights That is no longer true of the UK As I said I represent four companies all Americans that have been targeted by the Online Safety Act and every single one has been threatened with fines and prison time for activity which is conducted and carried out wholly and entirely on US soil, but which the UK is now purporting to have jurisdiction over. And when challenged on that, they have persisted, right? They've done that in their pleadings. They've done that and correspondence that they've sent. They've said that the First Amendment doesn't apply on U.S. soil. So it's a really big problem. And the U.K. is trying to project its sovereign authority into the United States. And I think Americans are quite right to push back. And so, you know, someone was tweeting about this today and they said, you know, Preston, you know, you're being really unfair. You're comparing the U.K. with Russia. To be blunt, Russia is not a problem for any of my clients. Russia is not threatening them. The U.K. is. And so we go where the fight is. And right now the fight is with the United Kingdom because the U.K. is the country that's trying to take my client's First Amendment rights away. Well, so let's talk about some of your clients, because I think people might be kind of interested to know the different effects that these laws have on especially smaller platforms, because I feel like we all hear about the harms of Meta or Google or whatever, but those do not represent sort of the totality of the social web. And so I know you represent KiwiFarms, 4chan. Tell me kind of about your client roster. Yeah. So these are the big bads of the global internet. These are the websites where when you talk to a disinformation activist or someone who believes in content moderation, they will usually point to these websites as one of the worst things on the planet. You know, the root of all evil, et cetera, et cetera. And they'll say it's a terrible place. Let's not beat around the bush. These are very controversial websites. It's KiwiFarms, Gab.com, 4chan.org, and SASU, which is a mental health discussion forum where people are allowed to discuss certain subject matter I'm not going to talk about here so you don't get demonetized. And so essentially, these are very controversial websites. And that is why they were selected as the initial target set by the UK, because I think they assumed that either they wouldn't be able to afford a competent representation or that no lawyer would be willing to defend them. And for the most part, that's true. I think if you worked in a major law firm, particularly one with a transatlantic presence, one in the US and one in the UK, the likelihood that you could get one of these clients through a management committee process and onboarding, even if they could pay to say nothing of pro bono, is close to zero because of the risk profile. But when you're a free speech lawyer, right, you know, in Skokie, they defended the Nazis, right? That's the job of the free speech lawyer is to go out to the perimeter and defend the test cases where they're trying to prove the principle that the First Amendment doesn't exist. For me, that was a red rag to a bull. And I was like, all right, let's go. Let's get it on. And so, I mean, I'm not going to defend the content that's on these sites, right? That's not my job. My job is to defend their civil rights. That's the job. Because if their civil rights can be taken away, then so can the civil rights of every other American citizen? I think something that I really want people to understand. I've been targeted so aggressively by Kiwi farms. This resulted in my parents being swatted multiple times and other other fun things. Yeah. Some of these websites are bad, right? We don't like the content on there, but as you said, they always start with ones like that. They're never going to start with some website that's beloved. That's, you know, just for like people to talk about like some social network to talk about like kittens or something like they always go for this sort of sites that people have no empathy for or no sympathy for, right? They're just like, yeah, shut that down. That is bad. And then as you said, once they set that principle in place, it's going to be expanded out to everything else. So can you tell me a little bit about this legal journey? Like when did you start representing them? And then how have you and your clients kind of waged this fight against the UK government? Free speech is a very, very small part of my practice. I'm a head of legal for a private company, but also I have a small law firm on the side for a couple of clients that I've worked with for a really long time. So this censorship issue was not really on my radar too much when it started in early 2025. But I started hearing about it. Initially, it was Gab, and then I got connected with everybody else because I said, who's the only lawyer who actually is willing to deal with this and go toe to toe with the UK? And there are not many of us, to be blunt. And so we had to make a decision pretty early on, what are we going to do about this? Are we going to fight this really, really robustly and try to build a record, make a case? And ultimately, you're never going to win as a solo practitioner. or you're not going to win against the nation state by sending stupid emails. But you can win against the nation state by getting the attention of the government. And so what we did is we decided that what we were going to do was build a record and try to provoke the UK into saying really politically radioactive things that we could then forward to Congress and the executive branch to inform them exactly what was going on. And so that's pretty much exactly what we did. And so we got a hold of the House Judiciary Committee. The way we got a hold of them was that I found a phone number on a letter that they'd sent to Keir Starmer asking him to testify. And I called that phone number and I said, okay, hey, I don't know where this mailbox goes, but I'm the guy getting the censorship notices from UK Ofcom. Please call me back if anyone's interested. And 15 minutes later, I got a call back from a staffer saying, oh my God, please yes. And that started a process where we were connected to relevant individuals in the US government, later several states, state governments got involved. And so we created a pipeline where anything that was coming into the United States and the UK didn't know we were doing this. Although we told them, I don't think they really understood the extent to which we were doing it. We said, listen, we're copying the government on this. You should be aware. And I'm sure they read it and said, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some small time solo practitioner. No, no. So we were copying about a dozen government inboxes on every single letter that's been coming into the United States for the better part of 10 months, which means that the United States was able to see the escalating nature of the censorship campaign. And also they were able to sort fact from fiction in terms of the representations that were being made by the UK about the, like, for example, they'd say, well, no, this is just about protecting kids, right? And then they went after Gab, which is 18 plus, no adult content, edgy political content to be sure, but not a website, which is a porn website, right? So they were running it every time the US would send a delegation over to the UK, the UK would say, no, no, no, no, no, it has nothing to do with political content. Well, they picked a lot of highly political targets that are not pornography websites, for example, in order to prove the principle. So the U.S. was then able to determine, right, I presume, I don't have insight into their internal process, but judging what we've seen from the State Department recently, my hunch is that they were able to then parse fact from fiction here and say, okay, we have a really clear understanding of what's happening. In addition to that, 4chan and KiwiFarms decided to sue the U.K. And that lawsuit, you know, obviously we have claims and defenses, they have claims and defenses, that's going back and forth. I don't want to talk about it too much because, you know, it's still ongoing. But part of the purpose of that suit was to educate the wider American bar in a format that American lawyers can understand and ingest, chiefly a complaint and legal filings, and to explain to them exactly what's going on, exactly what's happening, exactly what our defenses are, exactly what the issues are with defending this kind of foreign intrusion, chiefly that the foreign government is going to immediately run for the cover of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to try to wriggle its way out of accountability in an American court and to tell both the American bar and Congress, listen, we need major, major, major law reform if these kinds of requests are expected to escalate, if we're going to give American litigators and the American system and the American courts the appropriate tooling with which to fight back. And we also drafted, as part of that, we drafted a law which has been filed, or a bill, which has since been filed in the state of Wyoming. It's called the Granite Act, like granite, like the rock. And that's a censorship shield bill, which addresses a lot of these issues from a structural point of view. And I'm reliably informed that that's been ingested in D.C. And I know for a fact, because Senator Eric Schmidt has said so publicly, that a censorship shield bill is forthcoming. I don't know what's in it. I'm hoping that the bones of what we proposed are in it. And if that's the case, then it's going to become very, very difficult if we get a law like that on the books for a foreign censor to enforce its orders on U.S. soil. Yeah, that's phenomenal. I guess, can you tell me a little bit about what happened with these sanctions? News broke right around Christmas that the U.S. government State Department was imposing sanctions on a slew of individuals for essentially trying to censor Americans. Can you talk about kind of who those individuals were and why is the State Department sanctioning UK and European figures, I guess, over these speech concerns? I can't speak for the State Department. I have no, again, no visibility into what their internal process is on that. My understanding is that these individuals work for nonprofit organizations. And my, you know, we know for a fact that these nonprofit organizations work hand in glove with European regulators. And really the function that they serve is a targeting mechanism. They advise European regulators what the pressure points are in the American system, which companies should be targeted, what kind of content needs to be taken down, which companies are the biggest violators. They hand dossiers of information to those regulators, and then the regulators take appropriate enforcement action. That whole industry has been criticized as something known as the censorship industrial complex. I think that term was coined by either Mike Benz or Mike Schellenberg or one or the other. And essentially, it's a group of private organizations that work with government entities, used to work with the United States under the Biden administration, but under the new management, no longer do so. And so they've sanctioned a number of those individuals, barring them from entering the United States. One in particular, Imran Ahmed, runs an organization called the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He's based out of DC. He's brought a First Amendment challenge against that decision, because interestingly, CCDH actually has a bit of a history with this. They were sued by X a couple of years ago for allegedly violating their terms of service. And basically they sought and secured dismissal of that lawsuit on the basis that their activities were protected speech, because you can advocate for censorship, right? That is allowed under the First Amendment. Now there's an interesting interplay there between, you know, the basically plenary authority that the United States exercises to decide who can stay and remain in the country and who has to leave and when. So that's going to be some very interesting litigation from a legal standpoint. But I think those individuals who are not in the United States, there's fairly strong grounds that they're going to remain outside of the United States. And of course, Europe absolutely went bananas and totally lost it over this. It was so funny to watch them losing their mind because these are people, some of these people have like aggressively advocated for censorship for years And now they like losing their minds that yeah the United States is doing this I think what Europe doesn understand yet is I think that was not that was not the payload That was a warning shot What Congress is working on is going to be the payload And if they don't like that five NGO activists got censored, I think the U.S. Department of State certainly has a lot more powder that they've kept dry. And this should be viewed really as the fact and the fact that everyone went so apoplectic, these people aren't even government, they're not even government officials. Right. But the taboo that was broken was that for a long time, the entire European censorship apparatus and much indeed of the European internet regulatory apparatus, including the GDPR, was predicated on the assumption that the American government would never say no and turn around and decide to reassert its sovereignty at its digital border. And the minute that the United States does this, the entire European regulatory project, which the Europeans sometimes describe themselves as a quote unquote regulatory superpower, that project falls apart because ultimately law is itself a local phenomenon, right? It exists within borders that has been the case since the peace of Westphalia for the last 400 years, right? So that is a fundamental operating assumption. And so a lot of these digital regulations they were building kind of assumed that they would be able to override that basic assumption because everyone was just trying to get along and playing nice. While the question of this old rule, like 60, 70 years, no one's ever answered the question, who gets to write the rules of the road for the internet? And the fact that the US has now pushed back means that, you know, I think there's a conceivable answer, which is that each country writes its own rules. And that is not something that the European regulatory order can survive. Yeah, it feels like what the EU is doing. It reminds me of a lot of what we see here in America, too, where you see states like Utah taking this really like activist approach with tech regulation and censorship laws, where they sort of tried to pass their Social Media Regulation Act, which was overturned, obviously. But I don't know, they're always up to something, you know, sort of trying to push these laws that then have like a ripple effect, I guess, on like how Meta or Google's platforms treats the rest of the country. And I feel like Europe has really even been outspoken about that and said, like, we're going to, you know, we're going to crack down on meta. We're going to do all this. You talked about on Twitter, these sort of like two competing approaches for the internet. And I think you kind of just got into it a little bit. But there is this European approach, as you mentioned, where these nations are sort of harmonized. And I guess these domestic censorship systems like all sort of work together. And then there's this alternative approach where you said where borders have meaning. Can you just elaborate a little bit on these two visions of the internet and kind of why they're all coming to a head right now? Yeah, so they're all coming to a head because there's a fundamental structural mismatch between the way that the Internet exists and the way that law works. If you see what a lot of the Europeans will say about, for example, my clients, right? They chime in all the time. They say, your clients are operating in the UK because their websites are accessible there, right? And so therefore, they have to obey UK law. And that's just not how the Internet works. It's not that when you navigate to a website, suddenly like magic little elves transport the website to your computer. It's that you're calling a server far away and you're asking it to send you data on a massive distributed network of machines that's not located in any particular place. Right. So it's a borderless creature and it lives in a world where borders are defined where rules apply. And so the Europeans, it's really the Anglosphere. Because I don't think anyone disputes that Russia and China have their own national internet ecosystems because they're willing to use really draconian powers and authorities to block websites that they think are just non-compliant or not conducive with their internal policies. Whereas the UK and Europe are traditionally quite open societies where you do have a long history of democracy. All of America's free speech ideals are ultimately European ones that were brought over and then implemented here. I mean, John Milton, right? He is the originator of free speech. He's English. That's why we have it is because he came up with the idea. And that idea then evolved over time and was developed into political doctrine in the United States. So as the rest of the world has drifted away from that, they want to figure out a way where they can engage in censorship, but they don't have to give up the fiction that they're not engaging in censorship. And so unlike Russia, China and those places, they've said, you know what we'll do? We'll come up with these duties and then we're going to conscript the Americans to carry out those duties on our behalf. So we don't have to get our hands dirty doing the censorship ourselves because that would be completely unacceptable politically to the societies which we govern. And that works as long as nobody in America calls your bluff. They attempted to enforce the OSA against four targets. Every single one, every single American target of that law refused. And these are tiny targets that have no reason for bravery, right, when they're up against a G7 nuclear armed member state. and yet they were so confident in the first amendment and such believers in the idea that we had to defend the principle that they said you know what we're willing to be exposed to immense personal and corporate jeopardy in order to defend that principle for the entire country and when state got involved that just confirmed it's not just a bunch of fringe platforms that have called the uk's bluff here and the eu's bluff it is the entire federal apparatus in washington dc which has done so and so the alternative vision is that essentially you can enforce your laws over people who are on your soil. And if you're trying to govern conduct on American soil, you know, if you have the power to do that, you know, bully to you, good for you. But right now, the United States is the global superpower. And like it or not, the United States has the First Amendment, which means that, you know, within its borders, there's an expectation that the United States and its citizens will be able to enjoy the full length and breadth of the First Amendment's protection of speech online. And now we have a federal government and a federal apparatus, which is willing to use real hard power to defend it. So the difference is basically that the US approach borders still have meaning. Whereas the European approach was one where all of the countries that are not in the United States, but within America's political orbit said, you know what, we want to try to control what's going on in the United States for various economic and political reasons, that they may individually have, right? There are different reasons broadly between each of these countries, but overall, right, the objective is the same, which is to bring the American internet under the control of these other countries instead of the United States sole control. And it's always framed as cracking down on big tech. And I think that that's just so popular politically across the spectrum and in Europe and Australia and stuff. It's like, there's a lot of this tech lash happening. There's a lot of anger at these big social platforms. And so they claim, well, this is how we're cracking down on big tech. Obviously, we know that that's not the case. And as you said, I think it's so relevant to that the clients that you represent for TanQB Farms and stuff like, I think they're indicative of actually a huge significant part of the web that is affected by these laws that is not big tech, that is not these big companies. I wrote for The Guardian when the Online Safety Act went into effect that we saw Alcoholics Anonymous forums getting shut down, disability communities, like communities for young people to report abuse and learn about abuse. Like all of these things are shut down. And I think these have such ripple effects that people sort of don't understand because they think, oh, well, you know, it's just the EU being tough on meta or whatever. The other thing to keep in mind is that it's politically very broad what's happening here. I mean, you and I, for example, you obviously have been a bigger deal online than I've been for a very long time. I think it is highly probable that personally, we disagree on most things of a political nature. However, when it comes to free speech, as you said, I'm flattered that you learned things from my feed. I learned things from yours. And there was like zero daylight between us on this issue. And if you look on the other side of the political spectrum from the Gabs and the Kiwi Farms and the 4chans, Wikipedia is getting pushed around by the UK right now. Reddit is getting pushed around by Australia. Those are traditionally left-leaning forums. And so they're getting pushed around in a different way. Wikipedia decided to do a different strategy than we did. They went and sued in the High Court of England and Wales, decided to do it, you know, where the UK had the home field advantage and they lost. But ultimately, the objective of the global project is all of American tech, right? It's not a political thing. It's not a partisan thing. It's not a culture war thing. It's that the UK and Europe want sovereign control over American infrastructure, regardless of the political orientation of that infrastructure, regardless of who runs it, regardless of what function it serves, they think it's in their national interest to control the servers that we run. And so this is something which really endangers everything in the United States, regardless of source. And you've seen that, for example, Blue Sky, right? Another prime example. They, I think, pulled out of Mississippi over Mississippi's age verification law. And we're seeing other age verification laws start to get struck down in various places now. So this is something which affects everybody, regardless of where they are. And I think in Substack, another example, the CEO of Substack wrote a great op-ed in the London Telegraph the other day, where he said, listen, this is a threat to free speech. Google, you know, again, not exactly a bastion of conservative thinking, turned around and they said the online safety act is a threat to freedom of speech. So what we've seen is that most American tech companies that have had, that deal with user-generated content at this point have seen enough about the OSA, whether they implemented it or whether they refused it. You know, my client's strategy was, refuse it outright, raise awareness, make as much noise as possible, and frankly, punch the censors on the nose and let them know that they weren't going to be able to get into the United States without opposition. But other companies now have implemented the act. They've figured out exactly what it's all about. And they said, you know what, we don't want this, right? This is anti-American. That's starting to emanate from the political left, which I find extremely encouraging, because if we're going to beat this thing, we're going to need to get 60 votes in the Senate to do it. I love the sub stack. Of course, we love them, but they have been so silent on a lot of this. So I was really happy to see Chris's piece. I'm just curious kind of what you're seeing also domestically, like you mentioned, I think that this should be something that anybody, this is like our basic sort of American values of free speech and free expression. But honestly, the left and the right in America seem very aligned on censorship. Like we're also seeing in the Senate, these efforts very much led by the Democrats, though, I would say to repeal section 230, or, you know, to pass things like COSA, which again, is very led by the Democrats, but you also have Marsha Blackburn and a bunch of Republicans on I mean, Spencer Cox in Utah, there seems to be a lot of bipartisan support for censorship. And these laws that you're relying on to fight censorship abroad could even be dismantled here at home. And so I guess, what do you make of those domestic efforts to censor content? We are fortunate that we have 800 gorillas in the form of FIRE and NetChoice and other advocacy organizations which are extremely formidable litigation shops which are getting some of these laws struck down right and left I think last week NetChoice got one age verification law struck down in Louisiana, and then they got a preliminary injunction against another UK Online Safety Act style content law in Arkansas. So fortunately, because we have the First Amendment here, it's possible to fight back, right? And those fights are ongoing, and the shops that are doing that are very capable of fighting and winning. So I'm actually pretty optimistic. Part of my hope with the foreign censorship process is that by looking at what the UK and the EU have done, we can illustrate for those on both sides of the aisle, to be frank, that we don't want to copy that approach here in the United States. I think in the US, a lot of the campaigning for these censorship laws is very emotionally driven, and it's very difficult to say no to. Because you turn around and say, oh, my child looked at this website and then my child died, right? Something like that. And what politician isn't going to turn around and be sympathetic to that because, you know, this website obviously was responsible, even though in most cases, practically all of them, they're not. So I think with the sovereignty fight and the sovereignty angle, we have an opportunity to basically say to American legislators, listen, you're only seeing a very narrow sliver, a very narrow piece of the picture that's being presented to you by people who have very narrow interests. And those interests are very frequently, very closely tied to corporate interests that want to introduce age verification, for example, or other political interests that are just generally pro-censorship and don't want the internet to function the way that it has. So I think that the foreign censorship fight offers an opportunity to educate those individuals and also to reframe the discussion and remind everybody what it means to be American and what free speech actually means, right? And it means, if nothing else, it means the right to express things that people don't want to hear. Even if there's a very emotional appeal that that thing should not be heard, we have no business intruding on people's right to do so. So I think the tide is turning I think that with the fight back with foreign censorship, I think the EU and UK, to be blunt, I think they're going to lose. I don't see any world in which the EU DSA and the UK OSA really become operative for the vast majority of American companies. There might be some companies with large EU or UK footprints. For example, Google and Facebook have enormous campuses in downtown London. I don't think you're going to be seeing them making any arguments anytime soon that they don't operate in the United Kingdom or pulling out of the UK and getting their operations out of there. But for most American companies, I don't think the UK Online Safety Act is going to be a problem for them. Because I think we're going to respond very robustly and we're going to redraw a red line around our sovereign boundary and dare the UK to cross it again. And I don't think they will. So for the larger companies, you might still see that. Ultimately, that compliance might be voluntary. I think they would do it anyway just because it's in Google and Facebook and X's business interests to engage in some censorship or content moderation on their own. simply to avoid the political heat that comes with hosting stuff that's too controversial that most of their user bases find revolting and offensive, right? So that's why they do that, because it's good for business. And I think that that good for business approach ultimately is pretty closely aligned with what a lot of the UK Online Safety Act does. However, the UK Online Safety Act goes a little bit further, and it says it's compulsory that you have to do all this, and there are fines, and there are criminal procedures. And because of all that, this potential process is open to political interference by our government to compel outcomes on American servers that Americans wouldn't otherwise do themselves. You see UK politicians right, left, and center calling for Elon Musk to be jailed, for X to be seized, for X to be blocked, all this other sort of stuff, because the CEO of that company, Mr. Musk, has engaged in political speech that is disliked in the UK. And the danger of having a censorship law, which is enforceable against the company is that they will use that censorship law for political lens. They say that they won't. Right. But I just have zero confidence that that's the case. I mean, I think they already like there's so much soft pressure already. I'm working on a project right now on meta censorship stuff. And like they proactively censor so much based on what they believe regulators or people in power will like. And I think that's a huge problem as well. And it's almost even more problematic because there's not even oversight because they're not necessarily following a law. This is one thing that I think actually was good when Trump came to power, is that Meta started to roll back some of this aggressive censorship of their community guidelines violations and stuff that they were doling out. One thing that I think most people don't fully appreciate is that when you have these really punitive European censorship regimes looming over these companies, they have a huge amount of incentive to police American speech anyway, as just a general global principle, right? So just like with Section 230, it's one of those things which sits at the base of the Internet, and it's a basic operating assumption. And your average Internet user, when you're scrolling through Twitter or Facebook, you don't see Section 230. You're not going through it and going, oh, yes, there's a direct chain of causation between Section 230 and this particular piece of content, and I can identify that it's there. So I think if we manage to rebuild the perimeter again, erect a barrier between the United States and the rest of the world's regulators, where we say, listen, Americans don't have to obey these rules. And here's some confirmation, some hard confirmation that that's the case. I think what we'll wind up seeing is that the domestic Internet experience in the U.S. will become freer as a consequence of that, because at the moment we have all of these automated systems that are tuned to the European censorship rules because all of these companies have been building their compliance apparatuses, preparing for this for the last five years. And if you can confirm, listen, that censorship apparatus doesn't get into the United States, that's going to change what discourse happens in the United States. Because companies, generally speaking, they don't turn around and say, well, we're going to have one content moderation policy for the U.S. and a different one for the U.K. They'll just standardize and they'll say, listen, this is our this is our code. These are standard procedures. And we'll see, you know, in hindsight, the extent to which these foreign regimes were actually affecting our domestic speech here in the United States. But it's hard to do now because it's buried so deep in the stack and it's all automated. And it's been through multiple layers of abstraction and reinterpretation and legal things and various other stuff that it's really difficult to pinpoint exactly what the impact has been on American speech as a result of these foreign rules. So hopefully what we'll be able to do is beat this thing back and repel it. And then once we do that, the Internet will start liberalizing again. I know particularly like sex positive content in particular is something which on the political left has long been a problem. It started with FOSTA SESTA, which basically killed Tumblr, for example. And then you see this stuff with adult content age gating. And you're like, all right, well, there's adult content on Wikipedia, right? So like, what about that? Are we going to have to age gate Wikipedia next? There's LGBTQ content all over the place. I think a lot of leftists have started as somebody that's like cared about this for a long time. And I think it was really hard, especially after like in that first Trump era, like free speech got so coded to the right where like if you said free speech, you're like, oh, you mega now or whatever. But I think Palestine really changed people's perceptions. Like, I think that was the first time a lot of these leftists started to really realize that this, like, censorship was bad. And also that we don't want the government determining, like, what is and isn't, like, misinformation around things. Like, just foreign policy questions and everything. So I'm hopeful that it can sort of become a thing. But you're a lot more optimistic than me about the domestic stuff. But maybe I'm just, like, doomer-pilled. I'm like, oh, my God. The massive amount of money that goes into funding moral panic nonsense content is just insane. I talked to somebody that has like less than 10,000 YouTube subscribers and got, you know, offered tens of thousands of dollars to make one of these stupid series about how, you know, cell phones are killing people and all this stuff. And so I think we're up against a big propaganda campaign against speech. Yeah, but I think I see how much counter speech there is on this now, particularly that the U.S. federal government's getting involved. And, you know, it'll be interesting to see what Europe does in response. You can always rely on the European Union and the United Kingdom to do the wrong thing. When it comes to a major sovereignty fight with the United States, see, for example, the Suez crisis. I think that they still don't fully understand. And that's fine that they don't understand. But having been involved in this directly for a long time, I don't think they understand how sure the Americans are of our position and how certain we are that the Europeans need to be defeated on this one. And that's why I think they timed the fine of X. The European Commission fined X 120 million euros on December the 4th. I think they timed that because they assumed that that would be the opening shot and that there wouldn't be a coordinated response pulled together in time for the midterm elections. The Republicans would then lose the House and then nothing would happen. I think, you know, that was a mistake. I think that this the Trump administration and the House GOP caucus started working on this immediately as soon as he was inaugurated. And so we're really I think we're a year ahead of where the Europeans thought we would be. And so as a consequence, there's a really, there's a very good chance that we can pull something together from a statutory perspective that will make it extremely difficult for the Europeans to attempt to do what they've done so far to do that again. All right, Preston, well, I'm rooting for you and your fight. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Great to meet you. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like the show, please support me on Patreon via the link below. You can also buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.co. 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