ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has now become the #3 most banned account on Blueskyafter receiving its official verification on Friday, according to third party trackers. bluesky users, unexpectedlyit is angry about the government account hosted on the platform. Many recommend that others block the account directly or join a block list that includes all official US government accounts.
The blacklist was introduced after the White House and other government agencies under the Trump administration signed up to 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, 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 spot, just behind Vice President JD Vance, according to statistics shared with 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 join date checkthe account @icegov.bsky.social joined the social network on November 26, 2025.
The bill was verified a few days ago according to the independent Verified account trackingwhich suggests that either the Bluesky team didn’t have enough information to apply the verification checkmark, were somehow unaware of the account’s existence (doubtful!), or were internally debating how to handle the issue. Bluesky has not responded to a request for comment.
A tracer it now shows that the ICE account is over 60% of the way to becoming the most banned Bluesky account.
ICE today has multiple accounts on 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 the exception of YouTube.
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Bluesky’s decision to host and verify ICE establishes the social network as one that is now more in line with other, larger social media giants, rather than the original ethos of the open social web known as the fediverse, where the user community has more control over which accounts gain attention and traction.
The fediverse, which represents a network of independent but interconnected social media platforms, includes apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, to some extent, Instagram Threads, although Meta’s app is not fully integrated. 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 federated application running on the ActivityPub protocol, could be its smaller size. But also, any government account joining this network could easily be blocked by individual server operators. This would not prevent the account from creating its own server to post on fediverse, but other communities could refuse to merge (interoperate) with that server, greatly reducing its reach.
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko, who stepped down as CEO in November citing burnout, recently posted an anti-ICE message on Mastodonnoting that “Abolish ICE” doesn’t go “nearly far enough” to address the problem in the US
A day later, he was announced he was choosing his account to leave the bridge connecting Mastodon to Bluesky.
The bridging technology, which includes the project known as Bridgy Fed, aims to allow different decentralized platforms to connect to each other, even if they run on different protocols, as is the case with Bluesky, which runs on the AT Protocol. Coincidentally, Bridgy Fed today introduced a way to add domain blocklists in account bridges, which would potentially allow different users to block the government services they publish to Bluesky.
Rochko would not confirm whether ICE’s involvement with Bluesky was a factor in his decision to leave the bridge, saying the decision was “personal.”
However, there has often been tension between fediverse and the atmosphere or decentralized social platform that includes Bluesky and other, newer networks and applications such as Blacksky, Northsky Socialand more. Because the networks have different approaches to decentralization, each has its supporters and detractors, some of whom can’t even agree that the networks should be bridged in the first place.
