Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law
27 comments
·August 22, 2025wmf
Other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
shadowgovt
Meanwhile, nothing has changed on Mastodon.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
esafak
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China.
beeflet
technology does not work unless you use it
shadowgovt
[delayed]
sherburt3
[flagged]
sojournerc
Cool take. Shitting on the south is an age old American tradition. I have a hard time understanding why people gleefully have these attitudes towards fellow human beings. Does someone from Mississippi not deserve factual actual push back against these laws? If we can't fight it there, it'll be in Connecticut soon enough.
none_to_remain
You could very well read that as praise for Mississippi
ronsor
I read the comment more as a criticism of Bluesky ("nobody actually uses it [except California liberals?]") than a criticism of Mississippi.
TylerE
[flagged]
jrockway
What about the people that didn't vote for this? Every election is 49/51 so when someone says "they're getting what they voted for", half the people are getting the opposite of what they voted for.
gottorf
> get them to stop actively voting against their own interests
Such a tired trope that I wish would stop. The whole point of a plural democracy is that people will have different interests, and there are few things that rub me the wrong way more than the idea that people are too stupid to recognize what their own interests are and vote accordingly.
They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...