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
It‘s not only the registration, it‘s the complete usage of the service. Tricky thing.
In my eyes, this will be just the tip of the iceberg. Mississippi now, what reason comes next? DJT wanting to exclude specific groups of users? Cut off whole countries? Who knows... There will be additional reasons and if you ask me, this is just the beginning with the ugly potential to turn into censorship.
Got the point, but surely they will have more legal tools than I do with my single-user Mastodon-instance - which has registrations disabled, but doesn‘t prevent any country from reaching it. 🤷🏼♂️
The way I view it is that Bluesky is a new company that is growing fast, while a site like Pornhub has been around longer and I'm sure has a large legal team that monitors laws all the time. If Pornhub said it was better to cut their losses and see if waiting out and or not seeing a good legal standing to fight with these states, Bluesky likely didn't have much of a chance.