ICE became one of the most banned accounts on Bluesky after being verified

The ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) account is now the No. 3 most blocked account on Bluesky, after receiving official verification on Friday, according to third-party trackers. Unsurprisingly, Bluesky users are angry about government account hosting on the platform. Many recommend that others block the account directly or sign up for a block list that includes all official US government accounts.

The ban list was introduced after the White House and other Trump administration government agencies signed up with Bluesky last October to spread messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. Accounts that joined at the time included the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Transportation, Interior, Health and Human Services, State, and Defense, as well as the White House itself.

The move made the White House one of the most banned accounts on Bluesky, and today it remains in second place, just behind Vice President JD Vance, according to statistics shared on the tracking site Clearsky. (The site leverages the Bluesky API to track the most blocked accounts and other blocking activity.)

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

The account was verified a few days ago according to an independently run account verification program, which suggests that the Bluesky team either didn’t have enough information to apply the verification flag, was somewhat unaware of the account’s existence (doubtful!), or was internally debating how to handle the issue. Bluesky did not respond to a request for comment.

A tracker now shows that the ICE account is more than 60% of the way to becoming Bluesky’s most blocked account.

Today, ICE has several accounts across other social media sites, including X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These accounts are typically verified on platforms that have a verification mechanism in place, with YouTube being the exception.

Bluesky’s decision to host and verify ICE establishes the social network as one that now aligns more with larger social media giants, rather than the original ethos of the open social network known as the fediverse, where a community of users has more control over which accounts get attention and traction.

The fediverse, which is a network of independent but interconnected social media platforms, includes apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard, and to some extent Instagram Threads, although the meta is not completely unified. The US government does not have Mastodon accounts, but users can follow accounts like @potus on Threads from their Mastodon accounts, if they choose.

One reason to avoid Mastodon, an open source monolithic application that runs on the ActivityPub protocol, may be its smaller size. But also, any government account that joins this network can easily be banned by individual server operators. This will not prevent an account from setting up its own server to publish on Fediverse, but other communities may refuse to federate (interoperate) with that server, greatly reducing its reach.

Mastodon founder Eugene Rushko, who resigned as CEO in November, citing burnout, posted an anti-ICE message on Mastodon, stating that the “Abolish ICE” initiative does not go “far enough” to address the problem in the United States.

A day later, he announced that he had unsubscribed from his account on the bridge connecting Mastodon with Bluesky.

The bridging technology, which includes the project known as Bridgy Fed, aims to allow different decentralized platforms to communicate with each other, even if they run different protocols, as is the case with Bluesky, which runs on the AT protocol. Coincidentally, Fed Bridge today launched a way to add domain blocklists to connected accounts, which would allow federal users to block government agencies from posting on BlueSky.

When reached for comment, Rochko would not confirm whether or not ICE’s involvement on Bluesky was a factor in his decision to leave the bridge, saying the decision was a “personal” one.

However, there has often been tension between federation and the atmosphere, or decentralized social platform that includes Bluesky and other newer networks and apps like Blacksky, Northsky Social, and more. Because networks have different approaches to decentralization, each has its supporters and detractors, some of whom can’t even agree that networks should be bridged in the first place.