You’re going to see more of this heavy-handed response, especially from smaller sites or decentralized services.
As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
There are significant factions who would prefer porn be eradicated in it's entirety and laws like this just use 'protecting children' as the more agreable face to their crusade. Ironically the same people who often crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
> If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.
The US fought a whole war with itself over whether people should be allowed to own other people. They shouldn't, we decided, except on certain circumstances.
Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.
Conflating parenting with slavery and ownership is not only a category error but an offensive one. Parental authority isn’t ownership; it’s a duty to safeguard children’s developing autonomy and vulnerability.
Pretending otherwise betrays an indifference to children’s actual welfare, and a disturbing form of motivated reasoning deeply concerning in its implications.
That’s idiotic; as the amount of control parents are allowed over their children has never been lower compared to historical norms. We’re at the point a minor can get an abortion without parents being informed; which would have been unheard of and unthinkable 50 years ago, let alone the idea that a government would even mandate leaving parents unaware of a sexually active child. That idea didn’t even occur to the most rabid of socialist dreams.
Children are human beings who need growing autonomy as they mature, not property of parents. I have several (adult, to be clear) friends who have suffered serious damage due to overly authoritarian parenting.
In legal terms, children aren't full humans. They literally don't have fully formed brains and there isn't an expectation that they can make decisions that consider the consequences of their actions.
In the sense that a phrase like "growing autonomy" doesn't really mean anything, sure they should get that. Practically, they shouldn't have a lot of autonomy. The concept of childhood education is largely predicated on the idea that children have no idea what is going on and someone else should be inculcating knowledge, values and beliefs in them while making long term decisions on their behalf. And there is a pretty good argument that those values and beliefs ought be aligned with their family.
No, but the law is not a thing of subtlety and nuance. It is a thing of bright lines. It would be infeasible to have a law that says "children can make adult decisions when their parents think they're ready", so we have to pick a cutoff point which tries to strike a balance between giving too many immature kids power over their lives, and restricting too many mature kids from making decisions with their lives. Some kids will be unfairly held back because they are very mature at 15, some will ruin their lives because they are completely immature at 18. It's imperfect but no perfect solution is available.
Evil little fuckers. Who even thinks that the US Federal Government isn’t totally qualified to be in complete control of their children’s education and lives, anyway? Probably some racist Ruby Ridge types (/s)
This isn't even really it. If you read the section of Project2025 about porn and these sorts of age laws, then barely talk about porn at all. They lead with "transgender ideology" and such. The goal isn't to keep porn away from kids. The goal is to keep anything that offends their desired hierarchy away from kids.
This view is the antithesis of the entire, pluralistic, classical liberal project that this country was founded on. Everybody has a hierarchy, and people should, for the most part, be allowed to choose their own hierarchy. The problem isn't that someone dislikes porn or whatever, it's that they try and force it on the rest of us.
If you think they exist naturally, you're only looking at one of thousands of independent variables. If you average them out, we all tend towards mediocrity.
When someone appeals to hierarchies (e.g., "there's always a bigger fish"), they're just admitting to using a painfully one-dimensional worldview.
> As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
Well, they are implementing the block through political pressure, and it's working
I know people whose kid got a hand me down android from a friend and connects through neighbors open WiFi, public open WiFi etc…
And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.
It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.
But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.
There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.
We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.
I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
> I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
This problem isn't specific to children. Addictive and often otherwise manipulative too feeds affect people of all ages. Instead of age checks, I'd much rather address this. A starting point for how to do this could be banning algorithmic feeds and having us go back to simple algorithms like independent forum websites with latest post first display order.
It is. We force parents to send their children to school until they are 16 or educate them themselves—along with many other regulations on how you can raise your kids.
We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.
> That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.
I strongly agree with this. All these jurisdictions and politicians are passing laws that they don't understand the technical foundations for. Second order effects aren't being considered.
Sometimes (only sometimes, I promise) I wonder whether this kind of legislation is being dreamt up by a think tank tasked with planning how to implement some ulterior goal (e.g. massively increased surveillance to fight crime - it's far too easy to unsert something more nefarious here). The politicians then just follow the action plan and repeat talking points from party advisors.
This is the only mention of "age verification" in all 900 pages of Project 2025:
"In addition, some of the methods used to regulate children’s internet access pose the risk of unintended harms. For instance, age verification regulations would inevitably increase the amount of data collection involved, increasing privacy concerns. Users would have to submit to platforms proof of their age, which raises the risks of data breach or illegitimate data usage by the platforms or bad actors. Limited-government conservatives would prefer the FTC play an educational role instead. That might include best practices or educational programs to empower parents online."
The policy recommendations for "Protecting Children Online" are found on page 875. The two main recommendations they make are:
"The FTC should examine platforms’ advertising and contract-making with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice, perhaps requiring written parental consent."
"The FTC can and should institute unfair trade practices proceedings against entities that enter into contracts with children without parental consent. Personal parental responsibility is, of course, key, but the law must respect, not undermine, lawful parental authority."
Have you seen Congress? It’s like Denny’s on senior appreciation day.
They had to wheel McConnell in not long ago because he physically couldn’t walk.
And like I don’t mean to shit on the elderly (directly anyway) but I dunno just spitballing here, maybe we could get some folks in there who weren’t born yet when the civil rights act was passed???
> We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
This is the only correct response to such onerous legislation. Every site affected by such over-reach has a moral duty to do the same. Not that I expect them to do so.
If you think this is bad, you should see the regulatory burden imposed on small manufacturers. This is nothing. The problem is that voters don’t seem to care about regulatory requirements.
I can't find the comic I saw but I can't find that notes how we tell people and kids to not give out personal information on the internet because that's unsafe.
Now we demand they give all their information and depending on the situation smile for the camera ...
...And also lets make it so they can't encrypt their messages either. Big Brother needs to make sure they aren't sending nudes to people that shouldn't be seeing them.
Wait! Wait! Is this the same state that wanted welfare recipients to be tested for drugs and it was found that the drug use by legislators was ten times higher?
Figured I’d ask the HN crowd- what’s the best way around these geofence blocks? Have you had success with a system that can work smoothly on mobile/desktop without any of the disastrous privacy and performance implications that VPN services are prone to?
We might need a centralized age verification system. A person verifies their age using an app. The app is on the phone of the user and confirms opening new account.
Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified. Age verified accounts have the privilege of seeing sensitive content. Unverified accounts don’t have that privilege.
Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
A more appropriate route to that is to create incentives and grants for companies to be created that can accomplish this age verification infrastructure (ideally with its own privacy guarantees, etc), and make a declaration such as “in 5 years, you will be expected to validate and track the age group of all users on your platform. We have created grants to help create technology companies and a platform that will help to implement and privatize this service”.
That way you get both:
* companies that can provide the service (yay capitalism, middlemen and jobs!)
* compliance with the new laws that help to stratify users so that < 18 and > 18 users are identified and segregated.
All arguments about age checks themselves aside, why can BlueSky implement age checks in the UK, but not Mississippi? Seems to me like the only difference would be Mississippi requiring everyone to log in, whereas currently I assume UK requires a login just for age-restricted material. (Although I don't use BlueSky in the UK, so shrugs)
They could based on group but you can get around that. Maybe they are concerned that a user using a VPN from Mississippi would cause them to break the law.
Assuming mobile platforms weigh in with an API sometime, it's notable that the only people allowed online by default would be minors who are using parental controls, because they would be able to prove (a) age and (b) parental consent on day 1.
Is there not some way to route Mississippi's Bluesky traffic through a third party (Cloudflare?, etc.?) that can provide age verification and parental consent as a service, so that it doesn't require every individual online service to implement it separately?
Just a dog whistle for "stop taxing rich people" and "stop providing services to everyone else". They're very much in favor of restrictive regulations for the hoi polloi.
That republican party has been dead for a while now, to the extent that they won't even be ashamed. They think that government should be big, and doing the things that they want it to do.
The name is the same, but that's pretty much all that's left compared to 20ish years ago.
So, does Mississippi's age verification also apply to Twitter, Truth Social, Rumble, etc.? Curious what these right-wing platforms are doing about age verification. Surely Mississippi's attorney general will go after those platforms too...
>> "Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
You’re going to see more of this heavy-handed response, especially from smaller sites or decentralized services.
As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
There are significant factions who would prefer porn be eradicated in it's entirety and laws like this just use 'protecting children' as the more agreable face to their crusade. Ironically the same people who often crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
To be fair, their concern tends to be a more consistent "Don't push these corrupting agents towards me or my society"
If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
> If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.
If they had control of the school they wouldn't be talking about needing control of the school?
Just yield and do as they say, and they’ll maybe spare you.
The hypocrisy is very clearly evident.
And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
They do need to keep the morons, and knuckle dragging lawyers off the platform simply because of their felonious actions and prison records.
> And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
I've heard that it's full of furry porn and worse. Is that not the case?
It is. OP has cleverly redefined everything as being age appropriate with guidance, for convenience.
> crow about parental autonomy and how they should be in complete control of their children's education and lives.
Ah yes, those monsters
The US fought a whole war with itself over whether people should be allowed to own other people. They shouldn't, we decided, except on certain circumstances.
Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.
I would not call that a decision; it was the victor's dictate.
Conflating parenting with slavery and ownership is not only a category error but an offensive one. Parental authority isn’t ownership; it’s a duty to safeguard children’s developing autonomy and vulnerability.
Pretending otherwise betrays an indifference to children’s actual welfare, and a disturbing form of motivated reasoning deeply concerning in its implications.
That’s idiotic; as the amount of control parents are allowed over their children has never been lower compared to historical norms. We’re at the point a minor can get an abortion without parents being informed; which would have been unheard of and unthinkable 50 years ago, let alone the idea that a government would even mandate leaving parents unaware of a sexually active child. That idea didn’t even occur to the most rabid of socialist dreams.
Children are human beings who need growing autonomy as they mature, not property of parents. I have several (adult, to be clear) friends who have suffered serious damage due to overly authoritarian parenting.
In legal terms, children aren't full humans. They literally don't have fully formed brains and there isn't an expectation that they can make decisions that consider the consequences of their actions.
In the sense that a phrase like "growing autonomy" doesn't really mean anything, sure they should get that. Practically, they shouldn't have a lot of autonomy. The concept of childhood education is largely predicated on the idea that children have no idea what is going on and someone else should be inculcating knowledge, values and beliefs in them while making long term decisions on their behalf. And there is a pretty good argument that those values and beliefs ought be aligned with their family.
Does the brain form fully all of a sudden at age 18, except in Mississippi where it takes until 21?
No, but the law is not a thing of subtlety and nuance. It is a thing of bright lines. It would be infeasible to have a law that says "children can make adult decisions when their parents think they're ready", so we have to pick a cutoff point which tries to strike a balance between giving too many immature kids power over their lives, and restricting too many mature kids from making decisions with their lives. Some kids will be unfairly held back because they are very mature at 15, some will ruin their lives because they are completely immature at 18. It's imperfect but no perfect solution is available.
I agree kids need growing autonomy. Not unlimited autonomy though. The law clearly recognizes this.
Kids can’t sign contracts, I’m liable for damage caused by my kids, I go to jail if my kids skip too much school etc…
Really? Now do the math on all the kids harmed by overly lax parenting. Many of them are literally dead.
They are monsters because of what they will do to obtain their goals.
I mean yes, treating children as property that you control rather than people you are obligated to care for does make you a monster.
Guardians with a duty of care necessarily exercise control. That's not ownership, it's responsibility.
Evil little fuckers. Who even thinks that the US Federal Government isn’t totally qualified to be in complete control of their children’s education and lives, anyway? Probably some racist Ruby Ridge types (/s)
This isn't even really it. If you read the section of Project2025 about porn and these sorts of age laws, then barely talk about porn at all. They lead with "transgender ideology" and such. The goal isn't to keep porn away from kids. The goal is to keep anything that offends their desired hierarchy away from kids.
Everybody has a desired hierarchy; and you have one too. Own it; fight for it if you can; and recognize someone has to lose.
This view is the antithesis of the entire, pluralistic, classical liberal project that this country was founded on. Everybody has a hierarchy, and people should, for the most part, be allowed to choose their own hierarchy. The problem isn't that someone dislikes porn or whatever, it's that they try and force it on the rest of us.
With no recognition of what harm the desires result in? This is a fast way to all out war.
Have you considered finding middle ground and compromises? Or is war the only option?
Hierarchies are in and of themselves stupid.
If you think they exist naturally, you're only looking at one of thousands of independent variables. If you average them out, we all tend towards mediocrity.
When someone appeals to hierarchies (e.g., "there's always a bigger fish"), they're just admitting to using a painfully one-dimensional worldview.
> As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
Well, they are implementing the block through political pressure, and it's working
I know people whose kid got a hand me down android from a friend and connects through neighbors open WiFi, public open WiFi etc…
And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.
It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.
But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.
There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.
We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.
I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
> I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
This problem isn't specific to children. Addictive and often otherwise manipulative too feeds affect people of all ages. Instead of age checks, I'd much rather address this. A starting point for how to do this could be banning algorithmic feeds and having us go back to simple algorithms like independent forum websites with latest post first display order.
So you are saying that we should buy stock in VPN companies that serve Missashity?
"As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting."
Then why isn't that significantly regulated?
It is. We force parents to send their children to school until they are 16 or educate them themselves—along with many other regulations on how you can raise your kids.
We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.
> That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.
I strongly agree with this. All these jurisdictions and politicians are passing laws that they don't understand the technical foundations for. Second order effects aren't being considered.
Sometimes (only sometimes, I promise) I wonder whether this kind of legislation is being dreamt up by a think tank tasked with planning how to implement some ulterior goal (e.g. massively increased surveillance to fight crime - it's far too easy to unsert something more nefarious here). The politicians then just follow the action plan and repeat talking points from party advisors.
Yes: it's called Project 2025
This is the only mention of "age verification" in all 900 pages of Project 2025:
"In addition, some of the methods used to regulate children’s internet access pose the risk of unintended harms. For instance, age verification regulations would inevitably increase the amount of data collection involved, increasing privacy concerns. Users would have to submit to platforms proof of their age, which raises the risks of data breach or illegitimate data usage by the platforms or bad actors. Limited-government conservatives would prefer the FTC play an educational role instead. That might include best practices or educational programs to empower parents online."
The policy recommendations for "Protecting Children Online" are found on page 875. The two main recommendations they make are:
"The FTC should examine platforms’ advertising and contract-making with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice, perhaps requiring written parental consent."
"The FTC can and should institute unfair trade practices proceedings against entities that enter into contracts with children without parental consent. Personal parental responsibility is, of course, key, but the law must respect, not undermine, lawful parental authority."
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
Like the German Socialist Democratic Party did in Germany in 1933? How well did that go?
How can we be sure they don't understand at this point? They'd really have to be morons, how can they even take care of themselves?
Have you seen Congress? It’s like Denny’s on senior appreciation day.
They had to wheel McConnell in not long ago because he physically couldn’t walk.
And like I don’t mean to shit on the elderly (directly anyway) but I dunno just spitballing here, maybe we could get some folks in there who weren’t born yet when the civil rights act was passed???
Why would that matter? There are many young members who congress who also support the same things.
Tell me you've never taken care of an elderly person without telling me you've never taken care of an elderly person.
Have you listened to any legislative debates on technical issues? “A series of tubes” was the high point of political understanding of the internet.
Wait! What? The high point was a stunning display of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
We should pay John Cheese to call them all personally.
> We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
This is the only correct response to such onerous legislation. Every site affected by such over-reach has a moral duty to do the same. Not that I expect them to do so.
If you think this is bad, you should see the regulatory burden imposed on small manufacturers. This is nothing. The problem is that voters don’t seem to care about regulatory requirements.
I can't find the comic I saw but I can't find that notes how we tell people and kids to not give out personal information on the internet because that's unsafe.
Now we demand they give all their information and depending on the situation smile for the camera ...
...And also lets make it so they can't encrypt their messages either. Big Brother needs to make sure they aren't sending nudes to people that shouldn't be seeing them.
Wait! Wait! Is this the same state that wanted welfare recipients to be tested for drugs and it was found that the drug use by legislators was ten times higher?
Figured I’d ask the HN crowd- what’s the best way around these geofence blocks? Have you had success with a system that can work smoothly on mobile/desktop without any of the disastrous privacy and performance implications that VPN services are prone to?
We might need a centralized age verification system. A person verifies their age using an app. The app is on the phone of the user and confirms opening new account.
Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified. Age verified accounts have the privilege of seeing sensitive content. Unverified accounts don’t have that privilege.
Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
A more appropriate route to that is to create incentives and grants for companies to be created that can accomplish this age verification infrastructure (ideally with its own privacy guarantees, etc), and make a declaration such as “in 5 years, you will be expected to validate and track the age group of all users on your platform. We have created grants to help create technology companies and a platform that will help to implement and privatize this service”.
That way you get both:
All arguments about age checks themselves aside, why can BlueSky implement age checks in the UK, but not Mississippi? Seems to me like the only difference would be Mississippi requiring everyone to log in, whereas currently I assume UK requires a login just for age-restricted material. (Although I don't use BlueSky in the UK, so shrugs)
I'd prefer all businesses impacted by the draconian Brit legislation block the Brits geo completely.
The UK only requires verification for specific content. Not the entire site. Also, the identification and tracking requirements are very different.
Yes, they explained that the UK's regulations are less aggressive so it's possible to comply with them
They could based on group but you can get around that. Maybe they are concerned that a user using a VPN from Mississippi would cause them to break the law.
Assuming mobile platforms weigh in with an API sometime, it's notable that the only people allowed online by default would be minors who are using parental controls, because they would be able to prove (a) age and (b) parental consent on day 1.
I wonder if a business could be successfully sued for denying service to people OVER a certain age.
It's interesting that age seems to be a protected class if you're above a certain age and not below.
Is there not some way to route Mississippi's Bluesky traffic through a third party (Cloudflare?, etc.?) that can provide age verification and parental consent as a service, so that it doesn't require every individual online service to implement it separately?
I don’t think that service exists yet. These laws are very new.
Way to blow it, Mississippi
Reminder
Republicans, for many years now, have run on "stop big government regulations" without being specific.
Just a dog whistle for "stop taxing rich people" and "stop providing services to everyone else". They're very much in favor of restrictive regulations for the hoi polloi.
That republican party has been dead for a while now, to the extent that they won't even be ashamed. They think that government should be big, and doing the things that they want it to do.
The name is the same, but that's pretty much all that's left compared to 20ish years ago.
I am curious how many other "social" sites took this stand.
I think what bluesky did is the only way to fight these laws that all it will do is be a boon to people who obtain and sell PI.
For people in Mississippi, you can always get a VPN. You should avoid Free VPNs, but that is your decision.
So, does Mississippi's age verification also apply to Twitter, Truth Social, Rumble, etc.? Curious what these right-wing platforms are doing about age verification. Surely Mississippi's attorney general will go after those platforms too...
Truth Social, X and Rumble are all backed by the very people who wrote the law, so will not be sued. Get Out Of Jail Free cards.
Answer to the obvious question:
>> "Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."