Bluesky Blocking Access to Mississippi
Bluesky (via Hacker News):
Mississippi’s approach [to child safety] would fundamentally change how users access Bluesky. The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines. The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
[…]
Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children.
Laws like these favor tech giants (which have the money to throw at compliance) and require the collection of sensitive identification material from every user for any purpose. As anyone who has followed the data leaks in the Tea app already knows, strict ID requirements for all users open up enormous risks for all users.
[…]
The case is being appealed and Justice Brett Kavanaugh has gone so far as to write, that the appealing party “has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits—namely, that enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members’ First Amendment rights under this Court’s precedents.”
Previously:
Update (2025-09-03): Mike Masnick:
Some companies have been blocked by foreign countries, or blocked access in other countries. But geoblocking specific states had generally been limited to adult content sites in the past. This unprecedented response highlights just how unworkable Mississippi’s law really is.
Here at Techdirt, we’ve been warning about the dangerous negative consequences of age verification mandates for years. But even then there are variations in the pure ridiculousness of some of these laws. Some can be dealt with. Some are effectively impossible. Enter Mississippi’s HB 1126.
The bill is ridiculous in many, many ways. It first requires “digital service providers” (defined fairly broadly) to engage in age verification of every new user (the bill is written so badly that it’s not clear if it applies to accounts from before the bill goes into effect). If the user is deemed to be under the age of 18, the site is required to get “parental consent” before making the service available.
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I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop when they start going hard after VPN providers. That’s the next step.
