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

ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has now become the No. 3 most-blocked account on Bluesky, after receiving its official verification on Friday, according to third-party trackers. Bluesky users, unsurprisingly, are angry about the government account being hosted on the platform. Many are recommending that others block the account directly or subscribe to a block list that includes all of the U.S. government’s official accounts.

The blocklist was introduced after the White House and other government agencies under the Trump administration signed up for Bluesky last October to post messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. The accounts that joined at the time included the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Transportation, the Interior, Health and Human Services, State, and Defense, in addition to the White House itself.

The move made the White House one of the most-blocked accounts on Bluesky, and today it remains in the No. 2 position, just behind Vice President J.D. Vance, per stats shared on the tracking site Clearsky. (The site leverages Bluesky’s API to track which accounts are the most blocked and other blocking activity.)

ICE, however, 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.

The account was verified a few days ago according to the independently-run Verified Account Tracker, which suggests that either Bluesky’s team didn’t have enough information to apply the verification checkmark, was somehow unaware of the account’s existence (doubtful!), or was internally debating how to handle the issue. Bluesky hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

One tracker now shows the ICE account as being over 60% of the way to being the most-blocked Bluesky account.

ICE today 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 a verification mechanism, with YouTube being an exception.

The decision from Bluesky to host and verify ICE establishes the social network as one that’s now fitting in more with other, larger social media giants, rather than with the original ethos of the open social web known as fediverse, where the user community is more in control of which accounts gain attention and traction.

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, though Meta’s app isn’t fully federated. The U.S. government doesn’t have Mastodon accounts, but users can follow accounts like @potus on Threads from their Mastodon accounts, if they choose.

One reason for avoiding Mastodon, an open source federated app that runs on the ActivityPub protocol, could be its smaller size. But also, any government account joining this network could be easily blocked by individual server operators. This wouldn’t prevent the account from setting up its own server to post to the fediverse, but other communities could refuse to federate (interoperate) with that server, greatly diminishing its reach.

Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko, who stepped down as CEO in November, citing burnout, recently posted an anti-ICE message on Mastodon, noting that “Abolish ICE” doesn’t go “nearly far enough” to address the problem in the U.S.

A day later, he announced he was opting his account out of the bridge that connects Mastodon with Bluesky.

Bridging technology, which includes the project known as Bridgy Fed, is meant to allow different decentralized platforms to connect with each other, even if they run different protocols, as is the case with Bluesky, which runs on AT Protocol. Coincidentally, Bridgy Fed today launched a way to add domain blocklists to bridged accounts, which would conceivably allow fediverse users to block the government agencies posting on Bluesky.

Reached for comment, Rochko wouldn’t confirm whether or not ICE’s participation on Bluesky was a factor in his decision to leave the bridge, saying that the decision was a “personal” one.

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