Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi Over Age Verification Law

Mississippi people Can no longer use the Bluesky social media platform. The company announced on Friday that it would block all the IP addresses within the Mississippi in the foreseeable future in response to a recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which allows the State to apply a strict age verification for social media platforms.

According to Bluesky, the approach to the verification of the Mississippi “would fundamentally change” the way users access the site. “We believe that this law creates challenges that go beyond its children’s safety objectives, and creates important obstacles that limit freedom of expression and harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies,” the Bluesky team said in its press release.

Bluesky did not respond to a request for comments.

The company claims that compliance with the Mississippi law – which would require identifying and monitoring all users under the age of 18, in addition to asking each user sensitive personal information to verify their age – is not possible with the team’s current resources and infrastructure. By not respecting the law, Bluesky could incur fines of up to $ 10,000 per violation. This is the first major social media platform to take such drastic measures in response to the law.

The laws on age verification, which on the surface are intended to protect children from harmful online content, have already started to have a largely impact on the use of the Internet in places in the world where they have been promulgated. In the United Kingdom, users who try to access everything, from pornography to social platforms must now submit to identity analyzes, credit card controls, age estimate analyzes, and even more to verify that they are over 18 years old. The state of Texas has a similar law, the Supreme Court of the United States resisted in June.

It is not clear if these laws are effective in protecting children; The use of virtual private networks (VPN) in the United Kingdom has increased just after its age verification law entered into force, while users have deployed technology to use their location. On platforms like Discord, people discovered that they could use video game characters to deceive face analyzes. In addition, criticisms claim that age verification laws intended to reduce damage to children can sometimes have the opposite effect by ending children in theft of identity and privacy violations.

Wired has contacted the sponsors of the original bill, representatives of the state of Mississippi Jill Ford, Fabian Nelson and Larry Byrd, and will update this story if they comment.

“We believe that effective children’s safety policies should be carefully adapted to deal with real damage, without creating enormous obstacles for small suppliers and leading to negative consequences for freedom of expression,” wrote Bluesky.