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

ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has now become the lead agency No. 3 most banned account on Blueskyafter receiving his formal confirmation on Friday, according to third party trackers. Bluesky users, unsurprisinglyand angry about the government account being held on the platform. Many recommend that others close the account directly or subscribe to the block list that includes it all US government accounts.

The list was launched after the White House and other government agencies under the Trump administration signed up for Bluesky last October sending messages criticizing Democrats for shutting down the government. The accounts linked at that time Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Transportation, Interior, Health and Human Services, State, and Defense, in addition to the White House itself.

The move prompted the White House one of the most banned accounts on Bluesky, and today he remains in 2nd place, behind Vice President JD Vance, in the statistics distributed on the following sites. Clearsky. (This website uses Bluesky’s API to check which accounts have been blocked the most and other restrictions.)

ICE, however, did not cooperate with Bluesky in October. According to Bluecrawler’s Join Date CheckerThe account @icegov.bsky.social joined the Internet on November 26, 2025.

The account was guaranteed a few days ago according to independent-run Verified Account Trackerwhich suggests that the Bluesky team didn’t have enough knowledge to use the authentication token, somehow they didn’t know about the account’s existence (doubtful!), or they were internally debating how to handle this issue. Bluesky did not respond to a request for comment.

One tracker now shows the ICE account being more than 60% of the way to being Bluesky’s most closed account.

ICE today many 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 process, whereas YouTube is different.

The idea from Bluesky to host and verify ICE establishes a social network that is now closely related to the giants of social media, instead of the original culture of the open site known as fediverse, where the group of users is in control of the accounts they are attracted to.

Miscellaneous, which represent independent but connected social media networks, including programs such as MastodonPixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard, and, to some extent, Instagram Threads, even the Meta app is not fully consumed. 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 it Mastodonan open source collaborative program that runs on the ActivityPub protocol, can be small. Also, any public account logged into this network can be easily blocked by the server users. This will not prevent the account from setting up its own server to send to fediverse, but some domains may refuse to interact (associate) with the server, limiting its reach.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko, who he stepped down as CEO in Novemberabout fatigue, which has recently been written anti-ICE message on Mastodonnoting that “Get rid of ICE” doesn’t go “closer” to solving the problem in the US.

After a day, he he announced he was choosing his account outside the bridge that connects Mastodon and Bluesky.

The communication process, which includes a project known as Bridgy Fedis designed to allow different platforms to communicate with each other, even if they have different protocols, as is the case with Blueskywhich runs on the AT Protocol. It just so happened that, The Bridgy Fed today launched a process to add blocklists to integrated accounts, which would allow users to block government agencies from posting on Bluesky.

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

However, there have often been conflicts between the fediverse and the skyor a popular platform that includes Bluesky and other, new networks and applications like Blacksky, Northsky Socialetc. Because networks have ways to differentiate people, each has supporters and detractors, some of them. I can’t even agree that the network should be connected at first.