There's a lot of discussion of Mississippi's age verification law for social media today, after Bluesky announced they're blocking the state.
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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."
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Bluesky's announcement notes that
"This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently. We believe this flexibility is one of the strengths of decentralized systems—different providers can make decisions that align with their values and capabilities, especially during periods of regulatory uncertainty. We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice."
Of course, today 99.9%+ of the people using AT Protocol-based services are using Bluesky's app. More positively, though, there's a lot of momentum for non-Bluesky infrastructure. Over the last couple of weeks, hundreds of people have migrated their accounts to Blacksky; alternate apps were already getting a lot of attenition because they don't have to include the age verification Bluesky just introduced for UK users for the Online Safety Act; and projects like Northsky, Gander, and Eurosky are working on infrastructure that's not based in the US. So it'll be interesting to see how things play out.
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This probably shouldn't be marked NSFW?
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@naught101 it shouldn't, but anything posted on Mastodon with a CW is marked as NSFW on Lemmy. Similarly when the post bridged to Bluesky it got marked as "graphic media" lol. Not sure there's anything I can do about it in either case.
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Oh wow, did you post this direct from mastodon just by tagging the community? Didn't realise that works, that's super cool.
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@naught101 yeah, I just tagged the lemmy community ... and yes it is super cool! although, as the NSFW highlights, somewhat clunky around the edges ... if I don't include a CW here then it figures out the title on its own, and it's not always what I want.
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Yes and these comments also show up on mastodon.
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But I thought BlueSky was open source and decentralized? /s
EDIT: In case it's not obvious (as it apparently isn't to OP) if BlueSky was either of those things then it could not be simply shut down by a CEO.
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@Kirk It is. As their announcement says,
"This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently."
Of course, today 99.9%+ of the people using AT Protocol-based services are using Bluesky's app. But that was already in the process of changing, and stuff like this -- and the Online Services Act, and the (very justifiable) desire by Canadians and Europeans and everybody else not to be depending on US company's infrastructure are just giving it more momentum. So, it'll be interesting to see how it works out.
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But that was already in the process of changing
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I'm exhausted with all this. And it's not my fight. The fight belongs to the people of Mississippi. They elected their "leaders."
Until I know for sure that I am not on the hook to pay a $10K penalty for each person on my servers, I've blocked all Mississippi IP addresses from logging in and registering on my Mastodon, Piefed, and Friendica servers.
Wyoming will probably be next.
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Why is this post NSFW???
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@Jerry joys of federation - https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115074913304859444
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Considering many countries are implementing this at the same time, I'm not sure there will be any countries left to run an instance from or set a VPN connection at.
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US states are turning into legal trolls - that's how you know the empire is done for.
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Thanks for posting about this thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange
I'm interested (in a tired defeatist way) in what I need to do to stay on the right side.
It sounds like geoblocking is probably the quickest legally safe course of action, so perhaps it's bye Mississippi too...
