> While Ofcom were barmy to even try this

Quote from the article:

> Ofcom has targeted 200-ish American platforms with censorship orders; only four of those sites, all of which are my clients, refused

Seems like Ofcom broadly got the result they wanted. A 98% success rate is not going to be particularly discouraging to them.

> there is a level of understandable annoyance outside the US that the US does get to project what it wants and other countries don't

In my comment I explained how countries, including the US, project their laws by imposing controls within their jurisdiction.

The weird part about this case is how they thought they could directly project their laws into another country in a way that overrides that country’s constitution, and they expected the other country to override their own constitution in agreement.

That’s not the same. This was something weirder, which is why there is speculation that it was designed to fail as a demonstration.

Ofcom knows it's barmy. They are pursuing foreign sites because a) they are required to by law, and b) they are under political pressure to do so. But I suspect they are quite happy that it has backfired, to help relieve some of that pressure and bring into the open the barminess of the OSA enterprise.

The US in particular had to proactively not enforce British Libel judgements against US citizens. Because the vast majority violate free speech rights.

As a US citizen, I'm inclined to agree.

Ofcom didn't "try this"

4chan is suing Ofcom, not the other way round.

> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here

They have tariffs on foreign double standards because it's a key export business.

> Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk

Please point out where Jimmy Kimmel did that. I'll help, here's a transcript:

https://www.readtpa.com/p/read-the-jimmy-kimmel-monologue-th...

1. It's a Pyrrhic victory at best, read it. In reality, 4chan won even though they technically "lost" their argument. They aren't enforced up. That's the win.

2. It's not really obiter dicta because it's a district court order it's not something you cite, really as binding precedent. But if you read between the lines, the court is only dismissing Ofcom because it is part of a sovereign, which means it cannot maintain it's other position. The judge was making it clear he thought Ofcom needed to stop. The ruling is addressed to the parties not really to a future court. If I were Ofcom's lawyer, I wouldn't be celebrating this.

American double standards have nothing to do with this case and it's just a sort of throw in everyone seems to need to mention here. So what? Are they good or bad? If you think they're bad to extend jurisdiction, then take the win.

Long arm jurisdiction is the opposite of what happened here. That's where you pull people into US courts that might not be US citizens for things that happened not in the US. Somehow that implies that foreign companies should be able to reach into the US and bug people in the US not doing anything in their own country? Oh, but USA bad so you scored that point.

I think you're just seeing Lincoln's hat in the clouds.

Everyone on HN apparently thinks they have a law degree.

>4chan actually lost its case in the US District Court on 15 September 2026

Correct, but this update is in regards to Ofcom's evidence of 20th October in front of the parliamentary select committee to which they have to report, and at which they conceded that their ability to make legally binding cross-jurisdictional enforcement actions is limited when faced with the laws of another country. The wording she used is in fact very interesting: "If foreign courts decide to... try and get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we won’t be able to recover that money."

>Still, I suppose he needs to show he did something to earn his fees.

They have taken on the case pro bono.

> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here: [...]

> [...], the CLOUD act, [...]

The CLOUD Act doesn't do what you think it does. Here's a comment from a while ago with more detail [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226822

> We could go on and on and fucking on about American double standards here

And then you didn't. Don't throw 'obiter dicta' to the rubes and then completely fumble your distraction with the incoherent legerdemain of 'double standards.' Show some art, at least.

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sauce is 404

Donald Trump is currently suing the BBC for their speech.

In a UK court, of course.

Kimmel's comments supported a narrative that justified the murder of a US citizen for his opinions (not even that, but third parties' understanding of those opinions). Kirk himself never proposed anything violent; the narrative was promoted based on wild misrepresentations to that effect.

But all of your objections here (or rather, more specifically, the choice to present them all together as a list of grievances, given that they are connected by a theme but not otherwise related or coordinated) are 1) blatant whataboutism and 2) an attempt to wage "ideological or political battle" in violation of HN commenting guidelines.

> Cuba. ABC being hassled over Jimmy Kimmel making gags about Kirk. The White House restricting reporting. Ending support for public broadcasting. Book bans, the CLOUD act, the TIKTOK DIVESTITURE fercrissakes. Sanctions on the ICC.

You guys are basically Russia in denial at this point. Carried on by the momentum of your products that is heading straight for a massive disruption by AI.

Sanctions on the ICC are not censorship. The ICC has never had and will never have jurisdiction to threaten or pass judgement on Americans. Sanctions are an entirely justified response to their recent attempts to overstep their authority.

There are no book bans in the US. Individual libraries can be and are selective about what books they stock, and libraries for children justifiably avoid specific topics. The government has not actually banned any books lately.

The White House has not restricted reporting, it has merely denied entry to it’s press releases to specific parties. Those parties can still report on the facts (or make them up, as they are wont to do), they just cannot attend the White House’s press releases. Since attendance at press releases is by invitation in any case, this is definitely not censorship.

Supporting public broadcasting is not an antidote to censorship, and ending that support is not a form of censorship either. PBS was notorious for supporting only one political viewpoint, and there was just no need to waste taxpayer money on it. You would cry foul if taxpayer money were spent to advocate for political viewpoints that you don’t agree with.

Jimmy Kimmel’s “gags” were praising a murderer for the murder he committed. That’s incitement to violence, which is not protected speech.

The US’s sanctions of Cuba are not related to speech in any way.

If you really want to cite American double standards, how about American banks denying service to Americans based on their stated political and religious beliefs? <https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...>

Or how about the FBI declaring that parents at PTA meetings as “domestic terrorists”? Or targeting the Catholic church as an “extremist organization”?

That's not unique to their culture. Remember The Alamo? That was 190 years ago and we still celebrate our defeat.

Iran is pulling the same trick now, claiming it "won" just because the regime did not fall (yet). This is despite having lost most of their conventional army, navy, and air force, and having also mostly lost control of the straits of Hormuz.

This is how the UK gets it's own great firewall.

Demand online services change their services to conform to their law. Because its accessible from the UK.

Services refuse.

Up goes the wall.

No need gor a china-style great firewall. Just compel your local dns providers to stop resolving that website. That's what they do for copyright violations

Easy to circumvent ? Sure, but most people don't know how, so you've made the website inaccessible to the vast majority

Those toolkits don’t even seem to be intended to stop piracy - they seem to add value by slowing it down long enough to make the first 2 weeks (days) of sales. The people using them usually understand that.

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They're trying to punish someone purely for exercising freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We all know the USA punishes its own people for that all the time, of course, but only when the current administration agrees with the ruling, which this one doesn't. It's not that the constitution can't be violated - it's that violating the constitution can be used as an excuse in cases like this one.

An obiter dictum is not a "judgment", in the first place.

Exactly. Ofcom understood it needed a dog and pony show to answer the latest UK moral panic over 4chan. The headlines have moved on, and they can safely take off their costumes.

He lived in the USA's hemisphere. The USA has always exercises it's control of Europe less directly.

Yes.

What ties are there to the current conversation?

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>Indian citizens living in India, who have never left India and only do business with Indian entities

That's just one handshake away from their bank which does have business with US and their dollaridos.

> Why is this surprising? The United States does this all the time, successfully.

The surprise is that Britain is a local backwater and the United States isn't. You can't throw your weight around if you don't have any weight.

The difference is that Britain is not a super power and has not been for a long time. There is only China and the US. All other western nations and many eastern ones are shells of what they once were.

Dammit, my edit window ran out of time. Alas. While the 22nd April, 3rd June, and 10th June sessions are from that committee, they are unrelated to the inquiry of constitutional safeguards. Skip to the 15th July session. Here's a link to the inquiry: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9861/the-uks-constitut...

Anyway, after watching the session with Cummings, I have to say I'm deeply unimpressed with his contribution. While I found his bluntness somewhat refreshing, he was clearly irritated at being (repeatedly) asked to suggest actual solutions instead of just using the session as a pulpit for his grievances.

"parliamentlive.tv" doesn't sound any more reputable, but apparently it's official despite the foreign TLD!

He's not stupid tho, I've read some of his stuff and while I never agreed with Brexit I think he always proposed that there should be 2 referendums to validate the actual method of Brexit. He has a very fair point about the civil service.

His problem is he doesn't understand politics, and like Musk he's wasted his time getting involved with the worst people instead of focusing on what he's good at.

There is a competitive job market: working in the private sector. I think Cummings's claim is that talented UK citizens who would be very effective in the civil service are working elsewhere instead? I'm sure this isn't the whole of the explanation but it feels plausible to me

> Isn't the issue that the "big names" in the sector are not exclusively US based?

That is an issue, but it's explicitly not what I was talking about. To pick one example, Discord is -AFAIK- US-based. They decided to knuckle under rather than tell the UK, Australia, and others to fuck right off with their free-speech-and-association-limiting horseshit.

Multinationals have their own problems, but they're -when we measure by number of businesses- a tiny minority of businesses. My commentary was exclusively about US-based companies.

And even if a US-based company happens to have employees in a country that's pushing this shit, well, they can shrimply close that office and explain to local politicians exactly why. It's regrettable to lose good employees, but it's way worse to be far less of a hero in the fight for fundamental rights than 4chan and Kiwi Farms are just to keep a few good employees.

Rad. Thanks for the correction.

> You'll note the "First they came for" poem has a beginning and doesn't extend to all subcultures.

Just as saints and captains of industry deserve no less scrutiny and liability under the law than the rest of us, scoundrels and horrible people deserve no less protection under the law than the rest of us.

If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good, then you still have quite a bit of emotional maturity to develop.

To put the previous paragraph another way: It's entirely consistent to decry an someone as a loathsome scumbag that all upstanding people should shun and refuse to associate with while also remarking that that one time they dove into a freezing river to save a child being swept away was a good and noble thing to do, and behavior that we should all aspire to mirror.

The original German of the poem does say, at the final line, "Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte." That is, "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."

So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.

It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.

Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.

However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":

> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"

Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.

So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:

> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church#Aftermath

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marga_Meusel

They already track everything going through the undersea cables, why couldn't they start blocking at those points?

Why are you assuming that they aren't totally incompetent? They look pretty incompetent from my perspective. Or they just want to present the appearance of incompetence for an ulterior motive? That seems needlessly complex when they are already admitting their malevolence daily.

I heard the same argument for several years in Russia while government was building competences. They have money, so could just hire top tier commercial companies who are the best it their field.

I'm pretty sure it was to protect the children, or fight terrorism, or to save the NHS, or lower taxes.

That's not based on deep packet inspection; it's just low tech stuff like IP blocks. ISPs don't have the resources or expertise to DPI encrypted traffic (which is the majority of network traffic now).

You just need to follow this to the logical conclusion. They’ll ban using your proposed method, people will switch to VPN and other modern methods and to combat people still accessing the forbidden internet they will need DPI and TSPU-like devices

Sounds good. Why don't you want a strong military in European countries? They should pay their own military tab.

I hate to break it to you, but the UK has had a military for some time now.

You are right, in the case of UK, Israel is not the foreign government

I think it would be more accurate to say that the UK and US have different problems when it comes to freedom of expression, and each country tends to notice the problems in the other one more readily than its own problems (especially because the US right likes to use the UK as a whipping boy).

From a UK point of view, what stands out currently is the cowed state of the US media. There is very little sense of a free press effectively holding the administration of the day to account. Extraordinary levels of corruption and incompetence are remarked on merely in passing.

Number of US media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with Donald Trump in recent years: 4 (totalling about $67 million).

Number of UK media organisations that have reached a financial settlement with a UK Prime Minister in recent years: 0†

† The last instances appear to have been Tony Blair in 2007 (who settled with the Daily Mail over photos of his family taken during a private holiday), and John Major in 1993 (who successfully sued the New Statesman over allegations that he'd had an affair).

What the hell are you talking about? We have the same problems as the UK and they are just as bad. We are at the cusp, while the UK is further in, but we still have the same problems..

4chan and Kiwi Farms, which is something the article intentionally glosses over. Honestly, KF is a far more “dangerous” place in the eyes of the UK government, as 4chan hasn’t been relevant for around a decade, and the combined efforts to deplatform KF traditionally has been fruitless.

It is not blocked in the UK.

I think OFCOM themselves recognize the problem with trying to ban VPNs, but extremely dim MPs and extremely angry newspapers (who are the underlying enemies of free speech here) don't.

Did they fully block it or just put it on the blocklists that you can turn off in your account settings?

https://www.blocked.org.uk/site/http://www.4chan.org suggests the latter to me, but the checks aren't very recent

I think you meant to ask "are you in favor of the CLOUD Act and FACTA (among others) being enforced outside the US?"

Iranian Fatwas enforced/carried out by American courts, that could get interesting.

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>China does the same thing.

No, China is smart enough not expect foreign courts to carry out the work of the Chinese censorship regime.

its the exact same as the US vis a vis tiktok as well

> Testosterone has a lot of negative side effects, and I know I certainly wouldn't mind having about half as much.

Luckily (not really though) for you, you already do. Average testosterone levels have halved over the past 50 years due to a variety of modern poisons we consume on a daily basis.

I have a big problem with people like the unelected "eSâfety comissioner" and others brainwashing our young men into believing their primary natural hormone is a negative thing. You'd never see this happen the other way around (ever heard a woman say she has too much estrogen or her estrogen is bad? Ever heard a government agency push that?), but society in the West is more misandric than it's ever been - primarily because of women like her who are paid to demonize men and their culture and interests, and then by the highly feminized poisoned men who help them spread their bs.

Men with lower testosterone levels are more anxious, less confident, prone to group-think, have more mental health issues, sexual dysfunction, fertility issues, bone loss, social reclusiveness and awkwardness, low muscle mass and strength, fatigue, and the list goes on.

These highly estrogenized youth are fighting against an unfair disadvantage placed on them by governments who refuse to regulate industry and trying to restore their bodies to healthy levels. This is probably intentional too, because lower-T men are easier to control and tend not to think for themselves or resist a tyrannical government who is abusing their power and pillaging the working class of their earned wealth - which is a perfect description of the current Australiân govt.

It's no coincidence that birth rates have plummeted to extinction level in countries that are affected by this.

> Indeed, she explicitly says that fibermaxxing is bad because it replaces a healthy diet

You're making excuses for her and I have no idea why. Fibermaxxing IS healthy, that's the entire point of it. It's literally about eating natural whole high-fiber foods like fruits and vegetables instead of eating highly processed garbage, and supporting a healthy gut. She's actually advocating for an unhealthy diet and demonizing a healthy one. Not only that, but she's demonizing it because it's supposedly "manosphere" - not anything to do with health. Did you look up what those who do it are advocating for? Quick google search might help you dispell some of your preconceived notions.

Anything can be pushed to an unhealthy extreme. Exercise as well - you could physically exert yourself to death. But that's not what these trends are advocating for in general and only outliers go to the extremes. I'm surprised she didn't say "exercisemaxxing is misogynistic manosphere toxic masculinity" as well, would fit right in.

This whole thing would be far less frustrating and despicable if it were balanced - if they were going after the highly toxic and destructive feminist culture that is a far cry from the original, healthy feminist movement. If they were, I wouldn't even bother to talk about it, because at least I could say "fair enough - maybe their motives are genuine and they really are trying to resolve a divisive culture problem", but they don't. Because the people pushing this are part of that toxic new-wave feminist group and they have no interest in genuinely solving a problem, their interest is in shutting down the men who speak up against the corrupt government in Aus. Their interest is in controlling men because the govt sees men who think for themselves as a threat. No surprises that a government that has one of the largest percentage of women in it in the world would be pushing this slop though. It's also funny that whenever women are given positions of power they abuse their power to shit on men. There's a good lesson to be learned here.

Having spent a lot of time around kids who follow these trends, they're just looking to be better versions of themselves, and it's entirely healthy behaviour. Trying to optimize your hormone levels and eat healthy amounts of fiber is not misogynistic, "toxic masculinity", or "manosphere". Your response is a strawman, no one said anything about "abnormally high levels" - mens testosterone levels are half or 3x lower than they used to be on average because we're being poisoned on an international scale. Trying to get your levels back to a healthy natural level is not "abnormally high".

Yes. Ofcom sent multiple extortion letters to 4chan and Kiwi Farms, demanding they pay up and/or submit to British rule. Saying it was for “PR purposes” is equivalent to saying that reporting blackmail is for PR. GP also fails to understand that specifically US courts have no jurisdiction to stop international extortion, which is a loophole through the FSIA. For now, this creates a gridlock: the UK has no ability to seize assets from non-UK entities, but are free to fine and declare non-UK entities as in violation, which aids internal and even international pressure to censoring speech critical of the UK government. In response, US legislation is being proposed (GRANITE Act) that aims to close this loophole.