Bluesky shuts out Mississippi after age verification law targets social apps
HB 1126 is a fully enacted law in Mississippi that mandates age verification for all users of digital platforms.
The debate over protecting children online without imposing sweeping changes on the entire internet is playing out fiercely in the United States.
Mississippi, one of the country’s 50 states, has become a flashpoint with its HB 1126 law (officially called The Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act), passed by the Mississippi Legislature.
The HB 1126 represents one of the most aggressive attempts to find a solution to identifying underage accounts, yet Bluesky’s response reveals just how difficult that balance is to strike.
The law, which took effect in July 2025, forces all users—not just minors—to submit a government-issued ID to access social platforms. For those under 18, it goes even further: companies must verify age, secure parental consent, and maintain systems that track which accounts belong to children.
Bluesky says that is a line it cannot cross. Instead of building compliance tools, the decentralised social network announced it will block all Mississippi-based IP addresses. For a small team like Bluesky’s, that is a huge demand and one that sparks privacy worries for adults who do not want to share their ID just to scroll a feed.
Bluesky has shown it is willing to adapt when laws leave room for flexibility. In the UK, for instance, it rolled out age-verification tools to align with the Online Safety Act, which limits unverified users from accessing sensitive content or messaging features while still letting them access the wider platform. By contrast, Mississippi’s law throws the entire gate shut unless everyone verifies their identity.
Oluwaseun Bamisile
There is a lot on the line here. Noncompliance could bring penalties of up to $10,000 per user. Instead of pouring resources into verification systems that may collapse in court, Bluesky went with the cleaner option and cut off access in Mississippi until the legal dust settles. Anyone logging in without a VPN will now see a message explaining the block.
So far, no other major social apps have pulled out of Mississippi over the law, though the encrypted messaging app Signal previously warned it could take a similar step in the UK if the Online Safety Act undermined its encryption.
HB 1126 is also part of a broader tug-of-war across the U.S. At least a dozen states have passed social media age-verification laws in recent years, but many were quickly paused by federal courts for violating the First Amendment. Mississippi’s version survived—at least for now—after the Supreme Court declined to grant an emergency block in June.
The bigger question is whether sweeping laws like this can survive judicial scrutiny, or whether states will be forced to craft narrower, more privacy-conscious approaches. In the meantime, ordinary users carry the burden with less access, more friction and another reminder that the debate over online safety is far from settled.
