Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws | TechCrunch
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Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it's up to individual server owners to decide.

Decentralized social network Mastodon says it can’t comply with Mississippi’s age verification law — the same law that saw rival Bluesky pull out of the state — because it doesn’t have the means to do so.

The social non-profit explains that Mastodon doesn’t track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation. Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.

  • hisao@ani.socialEnglish
    9·
    19 hours ago

    Owning a lot of Tor exit nodes doesn’t automatically deanonymize users. Exit nodes only see the traffic as it leaves Tor toward the clearnet, not the original sender. To actually identify someone, you’d need to match their traffic entering the network with the traffic exiting - a correlation attack - which requires visibility on both ends. The US doesn’t “own most exits” either; the network is run by many independent operators, and the Tor community actively monitors for malicious relays. Even if a law forced US exit operators to log everything, that alone wouldn’t deanonymize anyone unless combined with large-scale surveillance of entry traffic, which is extremely resource-intensive and not guaranteed to work. In practice, governments can make running exits legally risky, but they can’t just legislate Tor anonymity away.

    • ezyryder@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      16 hours ago

      Governments also need regular users on Tor for it to function properly, otherwise it becomes easier to track down who is targeting you, most likely another government if they are the only ones with “legal” access.