Canada #89

Britain Is Trying To Censor Americans… But Washington Is Fighting BackPart One

Authored by Daniel Lü via The Daily Sceptic Saturday, Mar 07, 2026

Ofcom has confirmed it is referring 4chan to a final enforcement decision under the Online Safety Act. The target is a Delaware company that runs an entirely anonymous imageboard from the United States, with no offices, staff, servers or assets in Britain.

The demand: install age-verification systems and content filters so that British children cannot access the site or face daily fines levied from London on an American platform.

This case is not an outlier.

It is the clearest real-world demonstration of what the new generation of “online safety” laws requires: private companies must build automated filters that decide, in advance, which legal speech is too harmful for minors to see. The question the regulators never quite answer is simple: what exactly does the filter catch?

In the early 2020s, a political consensus formed on both sides of the Atlantic: social media is harming children and something must be done. The result in Washington was the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA); in Westminster, the Online Safety Act (OSA), which received Royal Assent in October 2023 and began enforcement in 2025. The political appeal of both measures is genuine. Adolescent mental health deteriorated in the 2010s, parents are alarmed and platforms have appeared indifferent. But good intentions do not make good law, and the form these interventions took is constitutionally and morally indefensible. Both KOSA and the OSA rest on a duty-of-care model: platforms must take “reasonable measures” or implement “proportionate systems” to prevent minors from encountering content associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. This is not a regulation of conduct. It is a mandate to suppress speech based on its topic and its predicted emotional effect on a reader: the very definition of content-based regulation.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated the constitutional problem plainly in its July 2023 letter opposing KOSA: the bill “is a content-based regulation of constitutionally protected speech” that “will silence important conversations, limit minors’ access to potentially vital resources and violate the First Amendment”. Under Reed v. Town of Gilbert, a law is content-based if it “applies to particular speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed”. Content-based regulations are “presumptively unconstitutional”.

>>24353976 (me)

Britain Is Trying To Censor Americans… But Washington Is Fighting BackPart Two

The ACLU identified three specific constitutional failures.

First, the speech targeted is protected. The Supreme Court has never permitted government to suppress legal speech simply because a legislature finds it unsuitable for children. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Court was unambiguous: “Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.” Creating a “wholly new category of content-based regulation” permissible only for speech directed at children would be “unprecedented and mistaken”.

Second, these regimes fail strict scrutiny because they are not premised on demonstrated causation. As the ACLU wrote, KOSA “is not premised on a direct causal link, but instead is based on correlation, not evidence of causation”. This is a decisive legal and moral point. In Brown, the Court struck down California’s video game restriction on exactly the same grounds: the state had produced only correlative data. A law that restricts the speech of millions of people must show that the restriction will actually prevent the harm it identifies. Neither KOSA nor the OSA can clear that bar.

Third, these regimes are both under- and over-inclusive. They leave news media, books, music and magazines entirely unregulated while targeting social media platforms. And they will, inevitably, sweep up beneficial speech alongside harmful speech: 92% of parental control apps have been found to incorrectly block LGBTQ+ content and suicide-prevention resources alongside material that is genuinely harmful. Congress, the ACLU concluded, may not rely on unproven future technology to save the statute.

The empirical premise of both regimes is that social media causes mental illness in adolescents. This claim is contested by a substantial body of peer-reviewed research. In a widely noted book review in Nature, Candice L. Odgers, a psychologist specialising in adolescent mental health at UC Irvine, wrote that the graphs produced by Jonathan Haidt in his work The Anxious Generation, which align the rise in teen mental illness with smartphone adoption, “will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines”. Hundreds of researchers, Odgers wrote, “have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative.” The direction of causality may run the other way: distressed and isolated adolescents gravitate toward online community; social media does not necessarily create the distress.

>>24353989 (me)

Britain Is Trying To Censor Americans… But Washington Is Fighting BackPart Three

The practical implication is stark. Existing criminal law already covers the most serious harms comprehensively: child sexual abuse material (CSAM), terrorist content, incitement to violence and harassment are all criminal in both jurisdictions and all designated “priority illegal content” under the OSA’s Schedules 5-7. The genuinely novel element of both regimes is the duty to suppress legal speech about mental health, gender identity and emotional distress. That element is what fails both the First Amendment and basic proportionality analysis.

The regulatory pressure on US platforms is not confined to Ofcom. On February 24th 2026, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent data protection regulator, issued Reddit, Inc. a £14.47 million fine for unlawfully processing children’s personal information: the largest penalty the ICO has ever imposed for breaches of children’s privacy. The ICO found that Reddit, despite prohibiting users under 13 by its terms of service, applied no robust age assurance mechanism from May 2018 until July 2025, and therefore had no lawful basis for processing the personal data of under-13s under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit’s omission to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) focused on the risks to children before January 2025 separately breached Articles 5, 6, 8 and 35 of the UK GDPR. Reddit has announced its intention to appeal, calling the ICO’s requirement to collect identity information from users “counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users’ online privacy and safety”. The ICO acted under its Age Appropriate Design Code (the ‘Children’s Code’) rather than the OSA, but the two regimes are coordinated: the ICO has openly admitted that it works in partnership with Ofcom, as the ICO stated in its December 2025 children’s privacy progress update, “to ensure efforts are coordinated”. The fine is legally distinct from OSA enforcement but functionally complementary to it: where Ofcom targets platforms’ content-governance duties, the ICO targets their data-governance failures, and the same underlying conduct of allowing age-unverified users to access content triggers liability under both regimes simultaneously. The ICO is now conducting a broader review of at least 17 platforms popular with children in the UK, including Discord, Pinterest and X. Reddit’s objection also surfaces another contradiction the ICO has not resolved: the age verification it effectively mandates creates a permanent record linking users’ legal identities to their platform activity, held by third-party age verification processors entirely outside the platforms’ own systems, and the data practices of those processors are, as the ICO’s own enforcement demonstrates, largely beyond the regulator’s concern.

More:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/britain-trying-censor-americans-washington-fighting-back

For Anon entertainment

Canada #89

==BACKFIRE: Woke Actor Ben Stiller Gets LEVELED With a Brutal Reminder After He Loses His Mind Over an Epic White House Video on Iran (VIDEOS)

by Cullen Linebarger Mar. 7, 2026

Shameless leftist actor Ben Stiller was left humiliated on Thursday after getting triggered over a White House video that included a movie of his.

The White House on Thursday posted entertaining footage on X as a humblebrag over the highly successful bombing of Iran. The footage includes clips of several popular action movies and TV series to make the video more epic and catch the attention of X users.

Such movies include Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Deadpool, Transformers, John Wick, Top Gun: Maverick, Iron Man, Tropic Thunder, and many more.

Stiller, who starred in Tropic Thunder, was angry that the White House had decided to include a clip from the film and demanded that it be removed. He also tried to remind them that “war is not a movie.”

“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip,” Stiller wrote. “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.”

But several X users quickly discovered photos of Stiller posing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the height of the Ukraine-Russia war.

Stiller was clearly anxious to virtue signal his support for a conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in four years, with seemingly no end in sight. Yet he is worried about a little clip of a movie being used to support the Iranian strikes?

What a hypocrite.

More:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/03/backfire-woke-actor-ben-stiller-gets-leveled-brutal/