Bluesky is starting age verification in the UK on July 25

"We’ll use Epic Games’ Kids Web Services (KWS) to give our UK community choices about how to verify their age. If you’re in the UK, you can choose between methods like payment card verification, ID scans, and face scans. (See here to learn more about how KWS safeguards user information.) For people who are under 18 or don’t want to go through this process, we’ll make adult-appropriate content inaccessible, and we’ll disable features like direct messaging."

"Highly effective age assurance” is a requirement of the Online Safety Act, so they don't really have a lot of choice. Still, not good! And with the US Supreme Court recently upholding Texas' age verification law, we should expect to see similar policies in other geographies.

#bluesky #OnlineSafetyAct

The received wisdom is that growth on Mastodon and Bluesky comes from big waves of new users who flee other networks when their owners say or do something particularly evil. But according to @laurenshof, that's no longer a given. "Musk managed to put himself up high on the list of people whose actions directly led for the largest number of deaths in the twenty-first century due to his involvement in the shutdown of USAID, but such evil did not meaningfully lead to people leaving Musk’s social network for other places," Hof writes for his Connected Places newsletter. Here, he takes a look at what's happening.

https://flip.it/nMcSJB

#Mastodon#Bluesky#OpenSocial#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#Twitter#ElonMusk#Tech#Technology