Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law Puts Decentralized Social Networks to the Test ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

The law, HB 1126, requires platforms to implement age verification for all users before they can access social networks like Bluesky. Recently, the Supreme Court justices decided to block an emergency appeal that would have prevented the law from going into effect as the legal challenges it faces played out in the courts. This forced Bluesky to make a decision of its own: either comply or risk hefty fines of up to $10,000 per user.

Users in Mississippi soon scrambled for a workaround, which tends to involve the use of VPNs.

However, others questioned why a VPN would be the necessary solution here. After all, decentralized social networking was meant to reduce the control and power the state — or any authority — would have over these social platforms.

Bluesky blocked access in Mississippi to avoid collecting more data about its users or risk stiff penalties. It points out the law there is more expansive and requires more data collection than the U.K.’s Online Safety Act. It is even, according to a note on JD Supra, more broad than the Texas legislation on which some of its language was based.

But, as Perez writes, surely the whole point of decentralized networks is their resilience to this kind of overbearing legislation. In a way, I guess they are — you can still use the AT Protocol, which underpins Bluesky, in Mississippi through other personal data servers. The same is true for ActivityPub and Mastodon instances, though Mastodon says it has no way to comply with the Mississippi law. That makes me wonder if individual Mastodon instances must each incorporate age validation. I do not see anything in the sloppy text of the law saying it applies only to services over a certain number of users. It seems to non-lawyer me this means any instance — or any Bluesky PDS — allowing interaction in Mississippi could be liable for penalties.