Foreign Regulators Are Trying To Censor Americans Online. A Bill Would Ensure Those Demands Are Unenforceable.

By now, many Americans are familiar with stories of people in the United Kingdom being arrested for social media posts. They may not know that overly zealous foreign regulators, such as the U.K.’s Office of Communications (Ofcom), have attempted to regulate and fine U.S. companies. These demands violate the First Amendment, and lawmakers may now take federal action to shield Americans from this overreach.

On Thursday, Rep. Michael Rulli (R–Ohio) introduced the Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion (GRANITE) Act. The bill states that U.S. courts “shall not recognize or enforce a foreign judgment, or a fine, order, or demand issued by a foreign court or a foreign state, enforcing a foreign censorship law.” It would also enable any American facing an unconstitutional foreign judgment to seek declaratory relief.

“The First Amendment prevents the government from infringing on Americans’ freedom of speech,” Rulli wrote on X. “Yet, foreign governments have decided that they have the right to target American citizens and companies for constitutionally protected speech online.” He says his bill will “defend our digital sovereignty and protect Americans from foreign censorship attempts.”

A state-level GRANITE Act has already been introduced in Wyoming by state Rep. Daniel Singh (R–Cheyenne). The state and federal bills are the brainchild of tech policy lawyer Preston Byrne, who drafted an original version of the GRANITE Act on his blog. Byrne represents U.S. companies, including 4chan, that have faced multiple unenforceable demands by U.K. regulators. Earlier this year, when Ofcom fined 4chan 520,000 pounds (about $703,000) for failing to comply with the U.K.’s Online Safety Act, Byrne told the regulators over email that the U.S. company “reserves all rights and waives none,” including “the right to sue you again and/or to respond to future correspondence with an even larger rodent, such as a marmot.” The email included a picture of a giant AI-generated hamster, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported.

In January, Byrne told Reason that there is a risk that “enough people will say, ‘OK, we just want the hassle to go away. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to comply because the letters are scary, and we’re not free speech activists and we don’t think that the U.K.’s rules are so bad.'”

Both the federal and state-level GRANITE Act bills would apply to all foreign regulators, not just the United Kingdom. But as U.S. lawmakers take steps to combat foreign censorship, the bipartisan push to enact domestic online safety bills continues. While these bills claim to protect children, they could threaten freedom online for all users, as companies must take precautions to comply with regulations intended to mitigate harm.

In June, the House passed the KIDS Act, a bundle of online safety bills that free speech groups such as Reclaim the Net have warned raise significant concerns about privacy and government overreach. Rulli, along with a bipartisan majority, voted in favor of the KIDS Act, which now awaits deliberation in the Senate. The Senate has also advanced several online safety bills this summer, including its version of the Kids Online Safety Act, which requires “covered online platforms, including social media platforms, to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17.”

Online censorship in the U.S. may not be as extreme as it is abroad (yet). But if U.S. lawmakers and companies continue to acquiesce to censorship demands from regulators at home or abroad, the online world as we know it will be less free, and its users will be worse off.