ICE becomes one of the most blocked accounts on Bluesky after verification

After receiving official verification on Friday, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is now the third most blocked account on Bluesky, according to third-party trackers. Bluesky users are understandably angry about government accounts hosted on the platform. Many people recommend that others block their accounts directly or join a blocklist that includes all official US government accounts.

The blocklist was introduced last October after the Trump White House and other government agencies signed up to Blue Sky to post messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. Participating accounts at the time included the White House itself, as well as the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Transportation, Interior, Health and Human Services, State, and Defense.

The move makes the White House one of the most blocked accounts on Bluesky, and it remains in second place behind Vice President J.D. Vance, according to statistics shared with tracking site Clearsky. (This site utilizes Bluesky’s API to track the most blocked accounts and other blocking activity.)

However, ICE did not join Bluesky in October. According to Bluecrawler’s join date checker, the account @icegov.bsky.social joined the social network on November 26, 2025.

According to the independently run Verified Account Tracker, this account was verified several days ago, suggesting that either Bluesky’s team did not have enough information to apply the verification checkmark, were somehow unaware of the account’s existence (suspicious!), or were debating internally how to handle the issue. Mr. Bluesky did not respond to requests for comment.

One tracker currently shows that the ICE account is more than 60% of the way to becoming the most blocked Bluesky account.

ICE currently has many accounts across other social media sites, including X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These accounts tend to be verified on platforms that have verification mechanisms, with YouTube being an exception.

Bluesky’s decision to host and verify ICE established the social network as more in line with other large social media giants, rather than the original spirit of the open social web known as the Fediverse, where the user community had more control over which accounts gained attention and attention.

The fediverse, which represents a network of independent but interconnected social media platforms, includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard, and to some extent Instagram Threads, but Meta’s apps are not fully federated. The U.S. government does not have a Mastodon account, but users can follow accounts such as @potus on threads from their Mastodon account if they wish.

One reason to avoid Mastodon, an open source federation app that runs on the ActivityPub protocol, may be because of its small size. But also, government accounts participating in this network can easily be blocked by individual server operators. While this does not prevent accounts from setting up their own servers to post to the Fediverse, it may cause other communities to refuse to federate (interoperate) with that server, greatly reducing its reach.

Mastodon founder Eugen Roszko, who resigned as CEO in November citing burnout, recently posted an anti-ICE message on Mastodon, noting that “abolishing ICE” is not “enough” to address America’s problems.

The next day, he announced that his account would be removed from the bridge connecting Mastodon and Bluesky.

Bridging technologies, including the project known as Bridgy Fed, aim to allow different decentralized platforms to connect to each other even when they run different protocols, as is the case with Bluesky, which runs on the AT protocol. Coincidentally, Bridgy Fed today launched a way to add domain blocklists to bridged accounts. This could allow Fediverse users to block government agencies from posting to Bluesky.

Reached for comment, Rochko would not confirm whether ICE’s participation in Blue Sky was a factor in his decision to leave the bridge, calling the decision “personal.”

But tensions have often arisen between the Fediverse and Atmosphere, or decentralized social platforms, including Bluesky and other new networks and apps like Blacksky and Northsky Social. Because each network has a different approach to decentralization, each has its own supporters and detractors, some of whom may disagree that there is a need for bridges between networks in the first place.