Due to new state law, BlueSky is unavailable in Mississippi -
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126Keeping children safe online is a core priority for Bluesky. We’ve invested a lot of time and resources building moderation tools and other infrastructure to protect the youngest members of our community. We’re also aware of the tradeoffs that come with managing an online platform. Our mission is to build an open and decentralized protocol for public conversation, and we believe in empowering users with more choices and control over their experience. We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features.
Mississippi's approach 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.As noted, and children's welfare aside, having to input personally identifiable information means that it would be easy to identify IRL people who post political statements that the current administration doesn't like. The effect on free speech, in the current environment of punitive retribution by the government for any speech other than that which is officially sanctioned, would definitely be chilling. So much for the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States/the Bill of Rights.
