Following the news that BitChute has suspended operations in the UK because it believes complying with the Online Safety Act is incompatible with its commitment to free speech, Gab has now blocked users in the UK from accessing its website. If you click on Gab.com in the UK, all you can see is a page with a quote from Milton at the top – “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” – and then the following notice:
ACCESS RESTRICTED BY PROVIDER
After receiving yet another demand from the UK’s speech police, Ofcom, Gab has made the decision to block the entire United Kingdom from accessing our website.
This latest email from Ofcom ordered us to disclose information about our users and operations. We know where this leads: compelled censorship and British citizens thrown in jail for “hate speech.” We refuse to comply with this tyranny.
Gab is an American company with zero presence in the UK. Ofcom’s demands have no legal force here. To enforce anything in the United States, they’d need to go through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request or letters rogatory. No U.S. court is going to enforce a foreign censorship regime. The First Amendment forbids it.
Ofcom will likely try to make an example of us anyway. That’s because the UK’s Online Safety Act isn’t about protecting children. It’s about suppressing dissent.
They’re welcome to try. The idea that a British regulator can pressure a U.S. company that’s IP-blocking the entire UK is as farcical as it is futile. If anything, it proves our point: censorship doesn’t work. It only reveals the truth about the censors.
We proudly join platforms like Bitchute in boycotting the United Kingdom. American companies should follow suit. The power of the UK’s parliament ends where the First Amendment begins.
The only way to vote against the tyranny of the UK’s present regime is to walk away from it, refuse to comply, and take refuge under the impervious shelter of the First Amendment.
The UK’s rulers want their people kept in the dark. Let them see how long the public tolerates it as their Internet vanishes, one website at a time.
The internet vanishing one website at a time? It’s beginning to feel that way.
You can read more about Gab’s run-in with Ofcom on its news site, which so far isn’t blocked in the UK.
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