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The war against anonymity is raging in Europe.
“The witch hunters work like a mob, and if enough of them phone the police, the police are going to come,” says Bernie Spofforth, a political activist who was detained by U.K. police for a social media post.
It’s coming to the United States, thanks in part to lobbying by “a massive network of NGOs” connected to the U.K. government, says Brian Chau, founder of a new AI-driven investigative journalism outlet called Effort.news. The technique, says Chau, is to smuggle in speech codes and effectively end online anonymity under the guise of “child safety.”
Their success could doom free speech on the internet. The good news is there’s a way to fight back.
The U.K.’s War on ‘Misinformation’
In England, you can go to jail for posting an angry opinion on the internet.
“They turned up with three police cars, a police van, four, five policemen. I don’t even know how many were there,” Spofforth says, recounting the night of August 8, 2024. “And they came into my house and arrested me.”
Her alleged crime? Posting misinformation.
After the murder of three children at a dance studio in the town of Southport, rumors swirled that a Muslim asylum seeker was the killer. Spofforth says she copied and pasted the rumor on X and added: “If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.”
It wasn’t true, but all hell broke loose anyway.
“I saw that this post had become very popular. It had a lot of reposts,” Spofforth says. “Now, if something gets a lot of reposts and you haven’t done the investigative work yourself, then the chances are it’s either a really brilliant post or a really bad one. And I just deleted it.”
Politicians and the local police chief blamed misleading posts like Spofforth’s for whipping up the riots that rocked Southport.
“The people to blame for the disorder are those conspiracy theorists who were putting out disinformation, completely incorrect information online,” the police chief said.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer blamed social media in a press conference following the Southport riots for inflaming the situation. He warned “social media companies and those who run them” that “violent disorder, clearly whipped up online” is a crime “happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere.”
Spofforth says it wasn’t mere social media posts that whipped up the riot.
“I think it is the murder of three little girls in a Taylor Swift dance class and the brutal stabbing of 10 others. That was what caused the problem,” she says. “The deflection for the government is, ‘Well, this wouldn’t have happened if we clamped down on disinformation and misinformation. And these people need to be shut up.'”
Spofforth admits that it was a mistake to post a false name and speculate about a triple-child murder. But being arrested and held for 36 hours, which is what Spofforth says happened to her, illustrates the difference between a country with First Amendment protections and one lacking them.
“In the U.K., you don’t need to break the law to be arrested,” she says. “So if someone says that they feel they have been harmed by what you’ve said, then you can be arrested. If someone says that what you’ve said is deeply offensive, they’re very distressed by it, you can be arrested. It’s insane.”
In the U.K., these kinds of arrests are common. Police detained comedian Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence for three posts on X saying that he felt “hate” for “misogynists and homophobes,” that he could “smell” a picture of a trans activist gathering, and that “if a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,… make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Dimitrie Stoica was sentenced to three months in jail for violating the 2023 Online Safety Act after faking himself running from rioters on a livestream. Lucy Connolly served a year for incitement after she reacted to the Southport stabbings by calling for mass deportations and saying that people could “set fire” to the hotels where migrants were lodging “for all I care.”
“I’d say, conservatively, there are probably 50,000 arrests per year in the U.K. for speech and conduct…that would be unambiguously and very clearly protected in the United States,” says Preston Byrne, an American free speech attorney. “What the Online Safety Act does is it moves that domestic regime online, because it says anything that would be illegal in the real world is also illegal online.”
4Chan Pwns Britain
Byrne fought Britain’s online speech regulator, Ofcom, short for Office of Communications, in court, representing 4chan, the notorious online message board where anything goes.
4chan received a notice in April 2025 from Ofcom informing the site’s owners that they needed to certify compliance with the U.K.’s Online Safety Act by ensuring British citizens can’t access “harmful” material. Otherwise, they’d face up to 18 million pounds ($24.1 million) in fines.
“This is an important case because it was the first time, really, that a foreign regulator had attempted to enforce a censorship fine on an American company,” Byrne says. “Foreign governments, the U.S. government, they don’t, generally speaking, try to go and take down popular speech. So the fight will always happen with the unpopular speech, because the unpopular speech is what people try to use power to suppress.”
At one point, Byrne replied to Ofcom’s repeated threats with a picture of a hamster and a promise that any future correspondence would be “shredded and used to line his enclosure upon receipt.” When Ofcom persisted, he replied with AI-generated images of larger and larger hamsters.
“They’re laughing at us, aren’t they?” one British commentator asked the U.K.’s technology secretary, who replied, “Yeah, and therefore we need to take further action.”
“It occurred to me…these guys aren’t taking this seriously. They’re not taking America seriously. They’re not taking our Constitution seriously. So I’m not going to take them seriously,” says Byrne. “It seems frivolous, sending a picture of a hamster to a foreign regulator, but ultimately it’s part of a communication strategy, which is designed to get the attention of people who matter in Washington, D.C., and make sure that they understand exactly what’s going on.”
Congress is paying attention. Versions of Byrne’s model legislation, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion Act, or the GRANITE Act, have been introduced in both House and Senate committees.
“What the U.K. is trying to do is they’re asserting that if content or a web server can be seen and viewed in their countries, that web server must obey the law of those countries,” Byrne says. “So we have a conflict. The United States First Amendment says an American on American soil using American infrastructure has the full protection of the First Amendment. The U.K. is saying an American running American infrastructure on American soil must obey British law. And if they win this fight, then the First Amendment will effectively cease to exist online.”
Europe’s Scheme To Regulate the American Internet
The U.K. government’s attempts to control Americans’ online speech don’t end there.
“From the get-go, the European slogan was that ‘We are going to be the regulatory leader,'” says Brian Chau. “In other words, ‘We are going to have the regulation that compels companies in other countries.’ That was their overt goal, and actually they’re succeeding.”
Chau is the creator of an AI-based news-gathering organization called Effort.news, which uncovered a U.K.-based lobbying effort to bring online age-verification laws to America.
“State laws are this incredibly, famously messy thing to track, because every state house has slightly different configurations on how you get their information,” he says. “I built a pipeline to get those state laws, to get other records like [Foreign Agents Registration Act] filings, for example. And I basically asked it, ‘Well, what’s the best evidence on foreign interference with tech laws in the U.S.?’ And it found the story autonomously, based on that data.”
Chau’s team assembled the data into an article, which he says was written by humans and not AI, detailing tech lobbying by nonprofits like 5Rights, founded by Baroness Beeban Tania Kidron, a member of the British House of Lords. Or there’s Reset Tech, which Effort points out is part of a five-member consortium, led by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, that received 4.9 million pounds ($6.6 million) from the European Commission. By Effort’s count, the ISD has taken in over $17 million in grants and contracts from the E.U., U.K. agencies, and the U.S. government, including the State Department.
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