Our Approach to Age Assurance
September 10, 2025
by The Bluesky Team
Update, December 8, 2025: Since first announcing age assurance in the UK, we have been balancing legal requirements and practical considerations to serve our users while following the law. Australia’s new online age assurance law takes effect on December 10, and we want to tell you about our response there and about a change for our users in Mississippi.
Australia’s law prohibits users who are under 16 from using social media, and requires platforms to protect users who are under 18 from certain types of content. Starting on December 10, we will require new users to complete age assurance using Kids Web Services (KWS). This is the same partner we use in other jurisdictions with age assurance requirements.
Users who are 18 or over will have full access to the platform. For users who are 16 or over, but under 18, we’ll make adult-appropriate content inaccessible, and we’ll disable features like direct messaging.
We also are applying the updates we made in Australia to let users in Mississippi who are 18 or over use the platform by completing age assurance. That means that access will no longer be completely blocked in Mississippi, though we will continue to make our service unavailable to any user under 18. We continue to believe that Mississippi law limits free speech and disproportionately harms smaller platforms. As a result, we will not follow the law’s requirements to track children’s online conduct in detail, and we will not devote our limited resources to build the verification systems, parental consent workflows, and compliance infrastructure the law requires. However, because we have the technical means to offer a choice for older users, we want to let them decide for themselves if they are comfortable confirming that they are at least 18 years old.
At Bluesky, we’re working to drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. We built our app to provide you with better choices when it comes to privacy, expression, and safety. That’s why we give people options for how content moderation works, on top of our baseline policies.
We recognize that promoting safety for young people is a shared responsibility, and we support the idea of collective action to protect children from online risks. We also recognize that governments may have strong, often conflicting, views on these issues and how to weigh competing priorities. In this rapidly evolving regulatory environment, our goal is to respect the law while balancing safety, free expression, and user privacy to serve the greater good of our community. Responding to new laws and regulations will require pragmatism and flexibility.
In the UK, we complied with a new law that requires platforms to restrict children from accessing adult content. In Mississippi, the law requires us to restrict access to the site for every unverified user. To implement this change, we would have had to invest substantial resources in a solution that we believe limits free speech and disproportionately harms smaller platforms. We chose not to offer our service there at this time while legal challenges continue.
South Dakota and Wyoming have also passed online safety laws that impose requirements on services like ours. These are very similar to the requirements of the UK Online Safety Act. So, as we did in the UK, we’ll enable Kids Web Services’ (KWS) age verification solution for users in these states. Through KWS, Bluesky users in South Dakota and Wyoming can choose from multiple methods to verify their age. We believe this approach currently strikes the right balance. Bluesky will remain available to users in these states, and we will not need to restrict the app for everyone.
We’re committed to keeping our community informed as we navigate these new regulations. As more states and countries adopt similar requirements, we will update this blog post accordingly.
Update, September 26, 2025: Ohio has a law similar to South Dakota and Wyoming regulations, so we'll be implementing the same solution in Ohio, effective September 29th.
Update December 8, 2025: Virginia's age assurance law takes effect on January 1, 2026. We are making an update to comply and will not allow users in Virginia who are under 16 years old.
Update December 16, 2025: We have made an update to comply with Tennessee's age assurance law and will not allow users in Tennessee who are under 18 years old.