Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi Over Age Verification Law

People in Mississippi He can no longer use the Bluesky social media platform. The company announced on Friday that it will prohibit all IP addresses inside the Mississippi in the foreseeable future in response to the US Supreme Court’s decision recently allowing the state to impose a strict age verification of social media platforms.

According to Bluesky, Mississippi’s approach to verification “will mainly change” how users reach the site. “We believe that this law creates challenges that go beyond the goals of the child’s safety, create large barriers that limit freedom of expression and harm insulting smaller platforms and emerging technologies,” Bluesky team said in its statement.

Bluezki did not respond to a request for comment.

The company says that compliance with the Mississippi State Law – which will require the identification and tracking of all users under the age of 18, in addition to claiming each user with sensitive personal information to verify their age – is not possible with the current resources of the team and the infrastructure. By not complying with the law, Bluesky may face fines of up to $ 10,000 per violation. This is the first platform for the main social media that takes such strong steps in response to the law.

The law verification laws, which aim on the surface, have already started to protect children from harmful online content, have already influencing the use of the Internet on a large scale in places around the world where they were enact. In the UK, users who try to reach everything from pornography to social platforms must now undergo identity checks, credit card checks, age estimate, and more to check that they are over the age of 18. Texas has a similar law in the United States, in June, despite critics’ concerns about the erosion of freedom of suspension and access to open information.

Whether these laws are effective in protecting children unclear; The use of virtual private networks (VPNS) in the United Kingdom increased immediately after the Age Verification Law, as users spread technology to give up their location. On platforms like Discord, people have discovered that they can use video game characters to deceive facial scanning processes. Moreover, critics say that the laws of age verification aim to reduce harm to children may sometimes have an opposite effect by exposing children to greater risk of stealing identity and privacy violations.

WIRED contacted the sponsors of the original draft law and representatives of the Mississippi state, Ford Ford, Fabian Nelson and Larry Bird, and they will update this story if they commented.

“We believe that the child’s effective safety policies should be carefully designed to address real damage, without creating huge obstacles in front of smaller service providers and causing negative consequences for free expression,” Bluezki wrote.