4chan responded to a £520,000 UK fine with a hamster in a Godzilla suit

Preston Byrne, the American lawyer representing 4chan, was asked by UK regulator Ofcom to pay £520,000 in fines under the Online Safety Act. He replied with an AI-generated cartoon of a hamster wearing a green Godzilla costume and holding a peanut, the BBC reports.

The fine breaks down into three parts: £450,000 for failing to implement age checks that would prevent children from seeing pornography, £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material on the site, and £20,000 for failing to set out protections from criminal content in its terms of service.

"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," Byrne wrote on X. This wasn't the first hamster picture sent to the regulator — 4chan has refused to pay all previous Ofcom fines, and Byrne has made a running joke of responding with increasingly elaborate rodent imagery.

Ofcom has issued nearly £3 million in total fines to tech companies under the Online Safety Act, but most of that money hasn't actually been collected. 4chan, which has no UK presence, employees, or assets, appears content to ignore British regulators entirely. The site's strategy amounts to daring Ofcom to try enforcing its penalties across the Atlantic, where US courts have no obligation to help.

Previously:

• 4chan fined by U.K. internet regulator for ignoring it
• UK vs 4chan: can one country's laws control the global internet?
• 4chan, file-sharing services among first targets of UK's "Online Safety" law