4chan won’t play by UK age check rules, raising question about enforcement potency If the UK doesn’t like how 4chan operates, it can shut the site down. That’s the gist of the message from the online message board best known for being an incubator for misogyny, in response to demands from UK regulator Ofcom that the site fall in line with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), and pay for violations. In keeping with its generally adversarial stance, 4chan says it won’t follow Ofcom’s rules because “the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War,” and as such UK speech law doesn’t apply to companies based in the U.S. In a letter from its lawyer, Preston Byrne, the firm says it “reserves all rights and waives none,” and punctuates the statement with an image of giant cartoon hamster Nigel J. Whiskerford dressed as Godzilla – per Byrne’s explanation on X, “a private international law service of process joke.” “I told Ofcom in Oct that their letters, which were not properly served, would be shredded for my pet hamster’s enclosure,” Byrne writes. From the beginning, 4chan has treated Ofcom’s demands as a joke. Ofcom has continued to prosecute 4chan, issuing a fine of £450,000 (about $596,000) to the site for “not having age checks in place to prevent children from seeing pornography on its site,” and an extra £70,000 (about $92,000) for not doing a risk assessment and not being complete enough in its terms of service. More fines are coming. But 4chan’s response raises the question: what good is enforcement if foreign companies simply ignore it? Debate over where responsibility for online content lives The question is primarily one of jurisdiction. In the U.S., the First Amendment reigns as holy writ, and American companies are happy to leverage it for their