Europe's Plot To End Americans' Online Anonymity
European regulators and NGOs are pushing their domestic speech laws and surveillance onto the American internet. But there's a way to fight back.
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.
5Rights and Reset Tech did not reply to Reason's interview requests. The ISD replied by email to say, "We in no way seek to curtail free expression" and instead seek to expose "industrial scale manipulation by hostile state actors like Russia, Iran and China…to prevent radicalisation…and stop supporters of nihilistic violence from carrying out school shootings."
"I think the way that's best to think about it is that this is an international network that was both funded by the U.S. government under [Joe] Biden and previously under [Barack] Obama, as well as funded by international governments," Chau says.
But why would foreign-linked nonprofits focus their efforts on age-verification laws meant to keep American children off social media? Chau says it's because these organizations realize that in order to control online speech, you must first abolish online anonymity.
"If you're anonymous, then they can't arrest you," he says. "So that's a long-time technological safeguard against these types of laws." But he believes that age-gating large websites will eventually lead to a de facto "digital ID" for most of the internet. "They will collect the ID of every single person who visits the sites that they regulate….In other words, it's not restricted to minors at all. In practice, this is a digital ID requirement for everyone."
These nonprofits may be pushing age-verification laws now, but in the past they spent the bulk of their resources trying to police misinformation and so-called hate speech on the internet. One group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, spearheaded a corporate boycott of Twitter after Elon Musk's takeover.
"There's plenty of evidence already with many of these NGOs that they're not particularly interested in the child safety aspect," Chau says. "They're interested in controlling speech on the internet and will use whatever narrative justifies that policy."
Byrne believes that the European NGOs' and regulators' "fever dream is that the internet is extremely tightly controlled.…Everybody is identified.…There's no anonymous speech. There is no ability for ideas which are not acceptable to the political mainstream to get traction and propagate."
Former U.K. Prime Minister Starmer announced a nationwide digital ID scheme called BritCard in 2025.
"You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It's as simple as that," Starmer said.
It wasn't so simple. Political backlash caused Starmer's Labour Party to back off the proposal.
"In the U.K., every time they've asked about digital ID, we've always said, 'We're all right. Thanks a lot. We'd rather not have you know everything about us,'" Spofforth says. "[But] quietly, behind the scenes, every single government department in the U.K. has created its data point, right? It's ready to go.…You might like that. You may think that's really convenient. And it might be convenient, but what happens if you don't agree with your government?"
England's digital ID plan stalled, but the Online Safety Act requires that any website Ofcom designates as potentially "harmful" to children implement "highly effective age assurance," such as photo ID or facial estimation. The E.U. is moving in a similar direction under the Digital Services Act.
But there's a small problem for the regulators: VPNs, virtual private networks that let users mask their physical location.
Proton VPN became the No. 1 free download on the U.K.'s Apple Store within days of age verification going into effect, and the company reported a 1,400 percent increase in sign-ups.
"They're so technologically stupid, they think they can ban VPNs. Of course they can't," Spofforth says. "But they'll find other ways around verifying your online name, face, age, and IP address. And once they have that, it doesn't matter if you are an anonymous account on X. They know who you are and they can stop you doing what you're doing. And I think that is absolutely terrifying."
But Byrne thinks the U.K. will be powerless to shut down discourse within its borders unless it implements totalitarian governance.
"Unless the control is total, generally speaking, these safety regimes are counterproductive," Byrne says. "And then once you have that total regime, congratulations, you're North Korea."
Chau thinks that could be exactly where governance is headed in Europe. He cites a historical study of regime stability that found that "coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes are the most conflict-prone."
"Governments which are stable tend to be at either end of the spectrum from autocracy to democracy," says Chau. "Either people think that they really can't do anything at all, or people think they are fully in control. And when you go around the middle, when people think, 'Oh, there's some chance that we can be in control,' but there are also people who are trying to clamp down on that, that's when something is unstable. And we're seeing the E.U. rapidly rush from one end of the spectrum to the other, where more and more information control is being imposed…to suppress the democratic process itself."
Liberty's Technological Edge
The good news is that even one-party states like China have failed to eliminate privacy tools like VPNs.
Chau believes the technological edge is looking increasingly favorable to free speech.
"The most dangerous phase has already gone past us," he says. "There were genuinely really severe and really significant concerns about concentration of power during the social media era. It was being used to censor political opinion, but that was not intrinsic to the technology itself. What was intrinsic to the technology itself was that now you knew about it."
He thinks AI will cause our would-be digital gatekeepers to further lose their grip. Chau's AI-driven journalism is one example of that. No government can stop him from running a local instance of an AI that's trained to bring forth inconvenient information that makes a regime look bad.
"The long-run ability for these illegitimate regimes to maintain political control has never been weaker," Chau says. "I just think there are all of these reasons to be optimistic. I think the people who are black-pilling…are confusing the unprecedented level of knowledge they have with what they perceive to be an unprecedented level of bad things happening."
But for those of us who want the free and open internet to survive, we need that technological optimism to be paired with real political action.
"Just because they legislate a ridiculous law, it doesn't mean that we have to play along with their delusions," Byrne says. "We asserted our constitutional rights and showed just how ridiculous that law is."
Byrne has written that, ultimately, "the UK is not going to listen to reason until America forces it to."
"Politically, there's too much at stake for them," Byrne says. "Essentially, this piece of legislation is owned by the British political establishment….They can't back down. They can't admit that they overreached. What they can do is they can turn around and say, 'Well, oops, you know, we bumped into a power greater than ourselves, the United States.'
"It's not humiliating to lose to the United States," he says. "It is rather humiliating to lose to 4chan. That moment will only come after the United States asserts its sovereign authority. To say, 'Listen, you're not allowed to touch our businesses, our companies, and our citizens.'"
America's strong free speech protections set us apart from the rest of the world, and we need strong legal, political, and technological defenses so that never changes.
Photo Credits: Cover Images via ZUMA Press (Newscom), The Peter McCormack Show
Music Credits: Salience Bias by Art Against Agony/ Pursuit by Brianna Tam/Particles by Nobou/Suburban Living by Adam Dib/Above the Clouds by Theatre of Delays/Outer Limits by Theatre of Delays/No Memory by Jimmy Svensson/Day Dreaming by Diamonds And Ice