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Preston Byrne Profile picture
Preston Byrne
@prestonjbyrne
Tech and free speech lawyer | Head of Legal & Compliance @arkham | Managing Partner @byrnestorm | Senior Fellow @ASI | all views my own
3 subscribers
Aug 29 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
The central question of the 4chan/Kiwi Farms lawsuit is this: do the six billion Internet users on our planet get to access American infrastructure on the terms of

- the First Amendment, or
- the UK's Online Safety Act. See this, unearthed by @thetimes, where Kit Malthouse and Ofcom's Chief Exec said the OSA applies to any company with a UK user *even if* the user hits the service via a VPN.

I presume they're referring to my client Kiwi Farms. Image
Aug 28 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
UK NGO Types: "Nothing in the Online Safety Act requires the removal of lawful speech"

...unless you're American.

Link to follow Image "The Online Safety Act is about preserving a status quo that benefited and enriched powerful platforms"

Then why were the UK's first targets a tiny American mental health discussion board and tiny sites with free speech moderation policies?

politicshome.com/opinion/articl…Image
Aug 25 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Fun fact: Baroness Beeban Kidron, a British peer, is one of the architects of the UK's Online Safety Act.

The charity she founded, 5rights, is involved with a lot of "kids' code" legislative proposals in the United States that would seek to impose similar censorship laws here. Image You can say something is to "protect the kids," but if its effect is to dox internet users and interfere with protected speech, it's a censorship law.

It ends with prison threats and fines, just as we're seeing now in the UK. These initiatives need to be kicked out of the USA.
Aug 22 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A Biglaw shop in UK warns: the Online Safety Act should be obeyed by Americans because the UK could get at us using the MLAT or the Hague Service Convention! Oh no!

Nope. US law is crystal clear: we will never enforce any provision of the OSA on our soil
natlawreview.com/article/byrne-…Image Also if any lawyer in London thinks that the U.S. will give reciprocity under the MLAT or that a U.S. court will enforce a money judgment based on OSA enforcement - a subject that I have personally broached with our government - there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you
Aug 20 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
U.S.-based technology firms should start asking for "non-enlistment clauses" whereby any contact of any U.S. service provider with UK censors entitles them to immediate notice and a penalty-free termination, so they can pivot to providers who aren't exposed to censorship risk. Bigger U.S. firms like Cloudflare and app stores should also consider that they're likely to be conduits for foreign censorship and may want to close down foreign ops + force customers to pay them over US rails.

Completely decoupling from the UK will be a competitive advantage.
Aug 20 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I am getting phone calls from buddies in London BigLaw about 4chan.

I suspect there are a lot of Americans who will want to replicate the playbook and are only just reading the caselaw and figuring it out for the first time now. For context, I have been in the business of telling foreign governments where they can shove a censorship request for 8 years. This is very old hat for me.

Difference between then and now is that then they only targeted 2 or 3 American companies. Now they're targeting them all
Aug 15 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Byrne & Storm, P.C. (@ByrneStorm) and Coleman Law, P.C. (@RonColeman) represent 4Chan.

We issue this statement on behalf of our client in response to press reports indicating that the U.K. Office of Communications, aka @Ofcom, intends to fine our client. Image The UK government should now understand that any attempt to touch any American company, however small, will be met with a coordinated U.S. legal response.

We will not let any American be picked on by any foreign power.
Aug 5 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The Online Safety Act is getting dinged in the traditionally left-wing UK paper, the Guardian, this morning on free speech grounds.

It's so over for the censors. Link in next tweet Image Link:
theguardian.com/world/2025/aug…
Jul 30 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
.@RonColeman and I will be suing Ofcom in federal court to protect all Americans from UK censorship.

If you run a tech company affected by the Online Safety Act and want to help us stop censorship at the waterline, have your lawyers ping me on LinkedIn.

We'll fight together. Zuck, Elon, Sundar, Tim Apple... this includes you.

One big defection from European censorship regimes, and it's over. They'll never censor any American again.

You know you want to.
Jul 29 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
.@Politico reports that the UK threatened Americans with criminal charges and imprisonment if they didn't obey the Online Safety Act.

This is an outrageous affront to American sovereignty.

Washington must act.
politico.com/newsletters/di… The UK’s letter, linked in the article, warns that Americans “may face imprisonment for up to two years” and other "serious consequences" for engaging in constitutionally protected conduct.

This is outrageous.

The consequences must be serious, all right - for the UK. Image
Jul 29 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Your government threatened three Americans with prison for exercising their constitutional rights, and was dumb enough to do it in writing.

Those written threats were handed off to a reporter yesterday. The world is about to find out what the Online Safety Act is really about. The reporter is DC-based btw. I wonder how DC is going to react, on the eve of America's 250th birthday, to the news that Brits are threatening to arrest Americans for free speech?
Jul 25 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Ofcom has been sending several American clients pretty stupid letters over the last six months.

Pinged the White House about it this morning. Got a callback 20 minutes later asking for recommendations for visa bans.

What a time to be alive. The Online Safety Act is not gonna make it. Brits have no idea how much anger there is in the U.S. political apparatus over Internet censorship and the lengths America - the entity - is prepared to go to stop it.
Jun 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
UK lawyers have to realize that they're not going to win the free speech fight by writing editorials.

They have to fight. That means taking on pro bono clients, arguing that a lot of decisions post-Redmond-Bate were wrongly decided, and advocating for law reform. 1,000 people a month are arrested under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 alone - 30 per day.

Any lawyer who claims to be a free speech advocate should have at least three pro bono clients with marginal cases and you should fight like hell to win them.
Aug 11, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It’s really funny watching UK lawyers and politicians claim that they can drag an American to their island to answer for protected speech.

They have no idea. They really don’t understand how awesome the First Amendment is. Relatedly, there other funny character is the British guy who thinks they have free speech and then explains it a 30 tweet thread listing every way in which the UK government can engage in what would be mostly unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in America
Jun 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
AI is the opposite of crypto. AI is digital abundance, crypto is digital scarcity. Putting in some automated crypto-gated systems to impose a cost on the flood of AI spam that’s coming our way is going to be more important in an AI world, not less “Hey, bot. You want me to read that screed you just sent me? Pay me.”
Jun 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
And soon they'll be spending millions of dollars litigating over them The thing about clients is that sometimes they don't actually know what they want when they come into your office. Pulling a template off a shelf is fine but the challenge is getting the client to understand commercial realities and possible outcomes...
Jun 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
“Trust and safety” is a dumb job title. If the job is censorship, the title should be “chief censor.” Not necessarily. Social media depends on censorship to function - bots, spam, fraud, and more all need to be eliminated. But just call it what it is rather than by some euphemism.
Jun 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
“AI Extinction Risk” seems to be an emerging grift for nerds who want to be on TV None of them proposes how they would actually mitigate the extinction risk so here are a couple of suggestions
Mar 12, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Bank failures can be the result of stupidity by those running the bank, or bad government policy. SVB’s collapse appears to have been due to a bit of both, but with major assists from Choke Point 2 shutting down Silvergate and years of bad policy by the Fed. The thing that bothers me most is that when SVB went down the fuse towards a wider crisis had clearly already been lit - SVB’s failure was contagion from the Choke Point 2 strangulation of Silvergate. But SVB is of course orders of magnitude bigger than Silvergate.
Mar 11, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This reminds me of the period immediately after Lehman collapsed. I was living in the City of London; the mood was dour, but late at night a shipping firm near my apartment had the lights blazing in a top-floor boardroom with a bunch of expensive cars parked in the street below. I doubt whether SVB can be saved. This should have been prevented last week with emergency legislation; the problems SVB have are systemic ones not unique to that bank. SVB was just uniquely vulnerable to a bank run given the nature of its customer base.
Mar 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
If the Treasury knew what they were up against, they’d have emergency legislation in front of Congress tonight and they’d enact before Monday.

If other banks are exposed to MBS the same way SBV was, they need to provide bridge finance to get them through high inflation. TARP 2. This is the exact same thing as 2008 only instead of terrible lending practices, it’s Fed policy which is eroding the value of the bonds on bank books. The government created this problem.