The social media platform Bluesky announced Friday afternoon that it had made “the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses,” after the State’s new social media age-verification law forced its hand. The company cited both the prohibitive costs of complying with the law as well as concerns over privacy and free expression.
For those of us at the Mississippi Free Press, this is a significant blow. We left Twitter earlier this year for a lot of reasons, and have since made Bluesky our main social media platform (it’s also where we have the most followers).
Republican and Democratic lawmakers sponsored and passed the age-verification law in 2024, called the Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act, with no opposition, citing a desire to regulate children’s use of social media. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch argued that the law will help protect young people from “sexual abuse, trafficking, physical violence, sextortion, and more.”
The law is named after 16-year-old Walker Montgomery, whose father said he died by suicide after a sextortioner on Instagram threatened to share an explicit video of him if he did not send them $1,000.
A federal court had blocked the law from taking effect amid a lawsuit from tech industry group NetChoice, but the U.S. Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect earlier this month while the lawsuit proceeds.
In response to that, the Bluesky team said in a blog post on Friday that while “keeping children safe online is a core priority” for the platform, Mississippi’s law goes too far for the platform to reasonably comply with.
“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 blog post says. “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.”
The Bluesky team also noted that while the law likely will not prove to be a major obstacle to larger social media companies like Facebook and X, smaller platforms will face much more difficulty.
“Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring—costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers,” the blog says. “This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.”
“We believe effective child-safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression,” it continues.
Bluesky says it will continue to block access to Mississippi IPs “until legal challenges to this law are resolved,” which could take years; it is currently in front of the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
As a nonprofit publication, we do not take positions on specific legislation or laws. But whatever the Mississippi Legislature’s intent, we now find ourselves in a place where we are now having to grapple with how to ensure we can stay connected with all of our readers, many of whom follow us on Bluesky.
We don’t know yet what this will mean for our ability to continue to post on Bluesky. Frankly, I’m more concerned about how this will prevent our readers who follow us on Bluesky from continuing to do so. I know that many of our more tech-savvy readers may find ways around IP blocks, but many won’t, and it’s up to us to ensure we’re still able to reach as many of you as possible.
I promise, we are urgently thinking about the best ways to continue to reach everyone and to expand our reach. We’ve weathered storms before (like the downfall of Twitter as a platform where we could meaningfully connect with our readers), and we’ll weather this one.
In the meantime, one great way to stay connected with us that doesn’t rely on social media is to sign up for our daily newsletter here. And if you can no longer access Bluesky to follow us there, you can find us on Threads, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
If you can, please donate at mfp.ms/donate. Your gifts now can help us expand and figure out new ways to ensure that our readers can still access our stories and, by so doing, uphold the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press—which is vital to a functioning democracy.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
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