This week, Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, touched down in the UK not to sip tea or admire the Crown Jewels, but to deliver a message as subtle as a boot in the face: stop trying to censor Americans in America.
Yes, really.
According to Rogers, the UK’s speech regulator, Ofcom, the bureaucratic enforcer behind Britain’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), has been getting ideas. Dangerous ones. Like attempting to extend its censorship regime outside the United Kingdom and onto American soil. You know, that country across the ocean where the First Amendment exists and people can still say controversial things without a court summons landing on their doormat.
To GB News, Rogers called this attempt at international thought-policing “a deal-breaker,” “a non-starter,” and “a red line.”
In State Department speak, that is basically the equivalent of someone slamming the brakes, looking Britain in the eye, and saying, “You try that again, and there will be consequences.”
To understand how Britain got itself into this mess, you have to understand the Online Safety Act. It is a law that reads like it was drafted by a committee of alarmed Victorian schoolteachers who just discovered the internet.
The OSA is supposedly designed to “protect children online,” which sounds noble until you realize it means criminalizing large swaths of adult speech, forcing platforms to delete legal content, and requiring identity and age checks that would make a KGB officer blush.
It even threatens prosecution over “psychological harm.” And now, apparently, it wants to enforce all of that in other countries too.
Rogers was not impressed, saying Ofcom has tried to impose the OSA extraterritorially and attempted to censor Americans in America. That, she made clear, is outrageous.
It’s more than a diplomatic spat. Rogers made it painfully clear the US isn’t going to just write a sternly worded letter and move on. There is legislative retaliation on the table.
The GRANITE Act, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion, is more than a clever acronym. It is the legislative middle finger Washington can consider if the UK keeps pretending it can veto American free speech from 3,500 miles away.
The bill, already circulating in the Wyoming state legislature, would strip foreign governments of their usual protections from lawsuits in the US if they try to censor American citizens or companies.
In other words, if Ofcom wants to slap US platforms with foreign censorship rules, they had better be ready to defend themselves in an American courtroom where “freedom of expression” isn’t a slogan, it is a constitutional right.
Rogers confirmed that the US legislature will likely consider that and will certainly consider other options if the British government doesn’t back down.
Of course, the GRANITE Act didn’t come out of nowhere. Rogers’s warning didn’t either. It is a response to the increasingly unhinged state of free speech in the UK, where adults can be arrested for memes, priests investigated for praying silently, and grandmothers interrogated for criticizing gender ideology.
“When you don’t rigorously defend that right, even when it’s inconvenient, even when the speech is offensive,” Rogers said, “you end up in these absurd scenarios where you have comedians arrested for tweets.”
This is the modern UK, where “hate speech” has been stretched to include everything from telling jokes to sharing news stories about immigration. And now, under the OSA, that censorious spirit has gone global.
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