There's a lot of discussion of Mississippi's age verification law for social media today, after Bluesky announced they're blocking the state.
Note that Mississippi's requirements go far beyond the Online Safety Act, MIssissippi's law, HB 1126, requires age verification for all users, and parental consent for users under 18., no matter what the content of the site is. Last week the US Supreme Court declined to block the law while it's being challenged in the courts, even though Kavanaugh described it as "likely unconstitutional".
The law clearly should be found unconstitutional - the amicus brief from @CenDemTech, @eff et al discusses why. Still, with the current Supreme Court, who knows; they just the (somewhat narrower) Texas age verification law also should have been found unconstitutional, but SCOTUS said it was okay. So who knows. And of course this is exactly the kind of chilling effect they're aiming for, which is why it's so disappointing that SCOTUS didn't block its enforcement until the case is heard.
As far as I know there isn't any guidance yet for people running fedi instances (or message boards, which are also covered). If you're running a US-based fedi instance, it's might well be worth talking to your lawyer about this. Here's the legislation, and here's the langauge from Section 4 (1)
"A digital service provider may not enter into an agreement with a person to create an account with a digital service unless the person has registered the person's age with the digital service provider. A digital service provider shall make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of the person creating an account with a level of certainty appropriate to the risks that arise from the information management practices of the digital service provider."
@fediverse @fediversenews
#fediverse #mississippi #ageVerification
I am there and it's not available.
@Kirk Ok, how about this here: https://deer.social/profile/bsky.app/post/3lwzadikbrc2u
That's just a frontend. It still requires a bsky.app account.
well I mean technically not, Kuba is self-hosting his account at https://lab.martianbase.net/
@Kirk Are you talking about reading posts or making posts or what? You said "produce a BlueSky post that is available in Mississippi", you can view that link in Mississippi.
You're right good job lol you managed to evade again.
A CEO is censoring a geographical region. That is just not something that can happen on a decentralized platform.
@Kirk Sigh, I'm not evading… I don't know what else I can tell you.
You said you thought it was open source. I showed you links to GitHub. I said they aren't censoring the entire network, just the official client. You said you wanted proof and to show you how you can view a Bluesky post in Mississippi. I showed you two custom clients that you can access from MS and one of those you can sign up through.
But you are evading. The technicalities you speak of are irrelevant to the topic of censorship. The fact that parts of BlueSky are technically open source, or that other BlueSky apps exist is irrelevant to the people who are functionally denied access to speak due to the decision of a single company. There is no other "instance" we can go sign up on like with ActivityPub apps.
(Here is the part where you say I could technically get all my friends to self-host their own PDS as though it is easy and fun).