4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches

chrisjj

a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster.

robthebrew

4chan is still a thing? I thought it died long ago. Perhaps I grew up.

rconti

> "Companies – wherever they're based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," she said. So the UK plans to fine Parisian bars that serve alcohol to British under-18s in France on holiday?

OsrsNeedsf2P

4chan's lawyer's response: "In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment."[0] [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko

bpodgursky

It does seem like if the UK wants to do content filtration (blocking noncompliant websites) they will need to own up to it and set up a China-style firewall, rather than hoping they can badger the service providers into doing it for them.

vasco

People used to tell kids to not go to a shady part of town while they spent their afternoons outside unsupervised. Can parents not tell kids to not go to certain websites? We still went to the shady part of town and the kids will still go to 4chan but at least we don't need to give away freedoms. Such erosion of freedom for the common person because parents can't have an awkward conversation is irritating.

erelong

"As they should"

dijit

The response from Ofcom doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If you are to sell a toy in the UK you must be a British company. (and must pay VAT and comply with British safety standards). If a consumer buys from overseas and imports a product then they do not have British consumer protections. Which is why so much aliexpress electrical stuff is dangerous (expecially USB chargers) yet it continues to be legally imported. Just, no british retailer would be allowed to carry it without getting a fine.

josefritzishere

The unpaywalled version on AOL https://www.aol.com/articles/us-messageboard-4chan-mocks-520...

john_strinlai

> However, a lawyer representing the company - which has previously said it won't pay such fines - has responded to the demand with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster. > The latest image is not the first picture of a hamster lawyers for 4chan have sent in reply to Ofcom amazing. same energy as the pirate bay telling dreamworks to sodomize themselves. i cant help but laugh at the absurdness of it.

gorgoiler

Meanwhile Google.com shows all manner of depravity if you click “safe search: off”. I realize there’s a carve out in the legislation for search engines but if the goal is to stop little Timmy finding pictures of an X being Yd up the Z then it is a resolute failure. The only thing that works with children is transparency and accountability, be that the school firewall or a ban on screen use in secret. ”screens where I can see ‘em!”

internet2000

Let kids go to 4chan. I frequented it and turned out fine.

patates

It would be marvelous if they used a drawing of a spider. https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html

wnevets

You mean the message board that collab-ed with Epstein? Delete them from the internet.

ecshafer

UK fining an American company for this is absurd. 4Chan isn't breaking any laws. You can make it illegal for your own citizens but you can't regulate a foreign business. UK citizens should fight for the right to free speech though.

DroneBetter

> Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%. assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help... )

guelo

There's always people that say it's the parents responsibility to monitor their kids. But as a parent, you either give your kids full access to the internet or nothing. The fault lies with the OS companies Google, Microsoft, Apple. They do a terrible job with parental controls. They make it very hard to setup, they're confusing and hard to use plus they barely work. I think they just do it as a checkbox for marketing or regulatory purposes. That's where I'd like to see regulation.

chuckadams

Amateurs. Russia has fined Google more than the GDP of the entire planet. Odds of collecting are about the same.

doublerabbit

£450k? - Quick, we must show we've done something. > or requiring Internet Service Providers to block a site in the UK. Ah, that's what they want.

cubefox

This part is somewhat surprising to me: > Data shows that nearly 80% of the top 100 pornography sites in the UK now have age checks in place. This means that on average, every day, over 7 million visitors from the UK are accessing pornography services that have deployed age assurance. I would have expected that most people would switch to other pornography sites that don't have age checks rather than doing an age check. But apparently that isn't the case. (Or their data is misleading. People in the UK who are using VPNs presumably can't be easily identified as British.)