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Bluesky Blocks Mississippi Over Age Verification Law

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2 months 1 week ago
People in Mississippi no longer have access to Bluesky. "If you access Bluesky from a Mississippi IP address, you'll see a message explaining why the app isn't available," announced a Bluesky blog post Friday. The reason is a new Mississippi law that "requires all users to verify their ages before using common social media sites ranging from Facebook to Nextdoor," noted NPR. Bluesky wrote that their block "will remain in place while the courts decide whether the law will stand." [U]nder the law, we would need to verify every user's age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The potential penalties for non-compliance are substantial — up to $10,000 per user. Building the required verification systems, parental consent workflows, and compliance infrastructure would require significant resources that our small team is currently unable to spare. Bluesky also notes that the law "requires collecting and storing sensitive personal information from all users...not just those accessing age-restricted content" — and that this information would include "detailed tracking of minors." TechCrunch notes that even blocking Mississippi has created some problems: Some Bluesky users outside Mississippi subsequently reported issues accessing the service due to their cell providers routing traffic through servers in the state, with CTO Paul Frazee responding Saturday that the company was "working deploy an update to our location detection that we hope will solve some inaccuracies." The company's blog post notes that its decision only applies to the Bluesky app built on the AT Protocol. Other apps may approach the decision differently. Interestingly, the law had been immediately challenged by NetChoice (a trade association of major tech companies). But while a District Court agreed, blocking the law from going into effect (until court challenges finished), an Appeals Court then lifted that block. A final appeal to America's Supreme Court was unsuccessful — although the ruling by Justice Kavanaugh suggests the law could be overturned later: "To be clear, NetChoice 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... [U]nder this Court's case law as it currently stands, the Mississippi law is likely unconstitutional. Nonetheless, because NetChoice has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time, I concur in the Court's denial of the application for interim relief."

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