Our Approach to Age Assurance

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.