Beginning in March, all accounts will have a 'teen-appropriate experience by default'
Discord announced on Monday that it's rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users' accounts to a "teen-appropriate" experience unless they demonstrate that they're adults.
"For most adults, age verification won't be required, as Discord's age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities. Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process," Savannah Badalich, Discord's global head of product policy, tells The Verge.
Users who aren't verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won't be able to speak in Discord's livestream-like "stage" channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
RelatedDirect messages and servers that are not age-restricted will continue to function normally, but users won't be able to send messages or view content in an age-restricted server until they complete the age check process, even if it's a server they were part of before age verification rolled out. Badalich says those servers will be "obfuscated" with a black screen until the user verifies they're an adult. Users also won't be able to join any new age-restricted servers without verifying their age.
[...] If Discord's age inference model can't determine a user's age, a government ID might still be required for age verification in its global rollout. According to Discord, to remove the new "teen-by-default" changes and limitations, "users can choose to use facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to [Discord's] vendor partners, with more options coming in the future."
The first option uses AI to analyze a user's video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user's device. If the age group estimate (teen or adult) from the selfie is incorrect, users can appeal it or verify with a photo of an identity document instead. That document will be verified by a third party vendor, but Discord says the images of those documents "are deleted quickly — in most cases, immediately after age confirmation."
Badalich also says after the October data breach, Discord "immediately stopped doing any sort of age verification flows with that vendor" and is now using a different third-party vendor. She adds, "We're not doing biometric scanning [or] facial recognition. We're doing facial estimation. The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information."
[...] Even so, there's still a risk that some users will leave Discord as a result of the age verification rollout. "We do expect that there will be some sort of hit there, and we are incorporating that into what our planning looks like," Badalich says. "We'll find other ways to bring users back."
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Privacy is prerequisite for free thought, dissent, experimentation, and innovation, which are in turn prerequisites for democracy. At NBTV, Naomi Brockwell has posted four reasons why limits on privacy are absolutely not a price worth paying for mainstream adoption.
Today I participated in a Privacy Salon in Denver where we debated a proposition that cuts to the core of the modern privacy movement:
"Limits on privacy are a price worth paying for mainstream adoption of cryptographic privacy."
I was on the "no" side alongside Matt Green, with Evin McMullen and Wei Dai arguing "yes."
It was a lively, thoughtful exchange that forced us to confront a deeper question: is weakening privacy simply the cost of scale?
Below is my opening statement from the debate.
The false argument about having nothing to hide does not hold water. As Ed Snowden observed years ago, "arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
Previously:
(2026) Ring Cancels Flock Deal After Dystopian Super Bowl Ad Prompts Mass Outrage
(2026) Discord Will Require a Face Scan or ID for Full Access Next Month
(2026) "ICE Out of Our Faces Act" Would Ban ICE and CBP Use of Facial Recognition
(2025) Big Tech Wants Direct Access to Our Brains
(2025) Discord Customer Service Data Breached; Government-ID Images, and User Details Stolen
(2025) A Surveillance Vendor Was Caught Exploiting a New SS7 Attack to Track People's Phone Locations
... and many more
(Score: 3, Funny) by mrpg on Wednesday February 11, @04:12PM (3 children)
"The first option uses AI to analyze a user's video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user's device"
So I can use my face to verify that I am an adult, and if i had friends or family I could too use my face for them all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11, @04:35PM (2 children)
Or a flesh-colored picture of Homer Simpson
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 11, @07:18PM
I would assume they'll be outsourcing identify verification to the same people who do I-9 instead of trying to roll their own.
https://www.e-verify.gov/plus [e-verify.gov]
I've had to do I-9 verification which is bullshit for 1099 contractors but "all must suffer equally" they got bitchy when I gave them my LLC's EIN instead of my SS number, but it worked out happily in the end (or at least they're still paying my invoices which makes me happy anyway)
https://www.e-verify.gov/supplemental-guide-for-federal-contractors-60-subcontractors-independent-contractors-and-1 [e-verify.gov]
My understanding is they can't roll everify downhill to me, because I can't everify myself, so they "had to" everify me. Whatever.
Anyway existing I-9 identify verification solutions use online video. "Look left" "look right" "hold the ID in front of your face" "jump thru flaming hoops with your drivers license in your teeth" etc.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Wednesday February 11, @10:42PM
That's what I thought, an AI-generated picture of an adult but I don't think that verify thingy will be that easy to circumvent... which means that it'll be. Discord changes provider and I assume the risks.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11, @04:31PM (5 children)
Private knowledge silos like Discord need to die
and the world needs to move past "social media" and "influencers"
saw this on Mastodon yesterday:
"The Revolution will not be digitized"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11, @04:40PM (2 children)
A safer internet is made by
encryption
privacy
open source
A safer internet is not made by
age verification
scanning communications
tracking & data collection
#saferinternetday
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday February 11, @08:44PM (1 child)
I'll just snip this bit to quote later:
Surely it says the same thing. Jokes aside, whatever happened to parental responsibility? Ah, guess the joke's on me.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday February 11, @10:03PM
Takes less priority to productivity (aka both parents working 3 jobs each just to stay afloat).
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mrpg on Wednesday February 11, @10:43PM (1 child)
I was thinking we should have closed spaces so AI don't scrap all our conversations.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Undefined on Thursday February 12, @01:05PM
Yes, this. I wrote a fully featured social media system (think similar to slack, discord, facebook, ryver, etc.) for my family and we're all (6 of us, which is all that are living) there instead of on the corporate algorithm suck train.
I have another instance for my friends; and another for my business. None of them have any need to be bumping heads with each other.
No advertising, no corporate/networked AI, no surveillance, no censorship, no search engine data theft, no trolls, etc. My system has every quality social media feature I've ever heard of, many I've never seen or heard of elsewhere, a much-enhanced ability to format posts, and it depends not at all on OPC / "frameworks" — just server-side Python and some client-side web page scripting. It took about four months of spare time to write. Totally worth it.
There are open-source systems out there that allow others to implement private social systems. Or, if you have the skills, write your own as I did. There's no better way to get off the bullshit train.
Of course you can still indulge, as I do here on Soylent, in contributing to public social systems — but it's freaking awesome to have a private space to retreat to, and to do business within. And while Soylent isn't exactly a madhouse of activity, and it certainly has its regressives and troll problems, the quality here is far above crap like Facebook and its ilk. None of which I would ever participate in.
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11, @04:45PM (2 children)
that Discord will go under because of users canceling Nitro payments
We'll see when/if they back down from age verification
Not that I would suggest, YOU cancel Nitro, of course...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 11, @06:02PM (1 child)
Two assumptions, that a significant amount of discord users use it for pr0n or worse, and that the peak nitro buyers ("whales") are the pr0n or worse users.
Let me look at my discord server memberships... we got three paying clients who will be unaffected and discord isn't a primary marketing channel for them so if discord turns into a PITA they'll just drop them (there's also a fourth who is addicted to discord and nitro), a youtube channel community I really like relating to my hobby interests thats fine under the teen rules, five programming-ish computer-ish related servers that will be utterly unaffected, and two games that will be unaffected. I know of one hobby hardware mfgr / supplier who actively buys and uses nitro and has stricter than teen rules as they border up against the maker/educational community so no 4 letter words allowed etc.
I find that its easy to join discord servers but hard to stay connected, discord is just not a priority for me. I'm more likely to have a convo using github or gitlab or similar as social media than I am to use discord.
In the end, I think making discord more of a PITA to share dick pics and groom kids will in general make it a better community for the other 99% of the users. I don't know if that 1% of weirdos do most of the nitro buying. In my experience the only nitro buying is happening from one supplier trying to make it a very active marketing community outlet type of marketing channel, and I'm not a member of any other servers where nitro buying is popular.
I don't entirely understand discord's business model. There's one server I'm on who try to use it as a major marketing channel which is stupid of them because they can be rug-pulled at any time. Other than that they don't make any money off me or anyone else I know, and $0 is about what its worth to me.
I don't know about discord's financials WRT being patreon adjacent. As you'd expect people who donate money to this dude's YT channel get enhanced access on Discord. I don't know if discord gets a penny from this. I would assume so? I would say the shitposting for this guys channel during livestreams is vastly better on discord than on youtube chat again he makes money off patreon I don't think discord makes a penny? LOL no its not a pr0n channel or OF he's more of an electronics repair dude, the most "questionable" thing you'll see is some really shitty soldering techniques. I've been soldering stuff since 1980 watching less skilled people do stuff results in cringe. Or some, lets say, interesting, judgment calls WRT static sensitive components. Just because some cmos chip or exotic transistor from 1980 hasn't been blown up yet by static electricity doesn't mean its immune in 2026 WTF bro.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12, @09:16PM
Then there's no need for face etc ID for nitro subscribers right?
e.g. parents pay for kid's package and selects a kid package.
parent pays for their own package and selects an adult package.
If a kid is adult enough to pay for their own adult nitro package they are likely more adult than the "least adult" adult?
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Wednesday February 11, @06:17PM (2 children)
I'm assuming that somewhere, someone is selling access to a "verify" portal that will take bits of information for their API and return a "score".
ie: Username, email, -> API -> 18+ or 18-
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday February 11, @07:05PM (1 child)
Oh yes indeed both Apple and Google.
I have some professional interest in this one due to a client having app interests although this will likely not affect me. I don't think I'll need to implement it but watching the drama in "app developer news" has been interesting over the past few months.
https://developer.android.com/google/play/age-signals/overview [android.com]
Note TOS line 2 there's been an absolute shitshow about that being interpreted or misinterpreted to mean that you can't use a competitor's age range API. I think ESL people are intentionally confusing "only use" with "use only". Also a shitshow about "age appropriate experience" somehow magically doesn't include the naughty list of marketing, profiling, and analytics, which is total bullshit. I would think the first thing I'd do with an 18+ app would be set up monitoring to make sure "we" are not sending inappropriate content to the under 18 crowd as part of normal monitoring, but the TOS seems to specifically make that illegal, if you accidentally send inappropriate traffic you can't monitor it. Note that TOS includes "for any other purpose" not just the naughty list, including experimentation, so technically my fun times experiment of just displaying the result to see if the API call worked was already illegal as the TOS specifically does not include debugging or app development as acceptable uses.
Its just a Fing disaster in the making, which makes me think the Google Play Age API is malicious compliance in action. Sure we totally got an API ready for censorship for app devs to use ... just a minor detail that it's illegal for devs to use under the ToS. Other than that, totally cooperating with the censors, sure.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Wednesday February 11, @09:19PM
You bring up ESL people ... but then you are the one that is confusing TOS with legality. Illegal has nothing to do with adhering to some interpretation of TOS.
Secondly, you are not breaking TOS if you debug API calls in your dev environment locally. It's very clear that TOS ban any sort of profiling of users based on this API, but that is all. The purpose here is for the app not to request things or to prevent it from working altogether, but said information is simply to remain on the device. ie. don't send it to backend that "user underage". Seems simple.
Finally ... it seems for your functionality testing, you would mock this API call.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Deep Blue on Wednesday February 11, @06:51PM
So after their data was stolen, they now want more data? I sure as hell wouldn't send my ID to this sort of service.
Also weren't they selling the data to some AI company or changed the terms of use or was it some other similar one? Anyway, not gonna touch that.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hopdevil on Thursday February 12, @03:35AM
Back in the day, the online group of friends and I would connect to someone's self hosted mumble server (teamspeak before that). I don't remember why, but probably the guy running the server decided it was to much work and far trendier to use discord.
A few months ago we switched back to mumble and have no regrets. It doesn't have the same quality of life or rich content features, but it supports mTLS with almost no effort.
To the folks that care about their personal data, there is at least one good open source option out there.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 12, @11:20PM
Good riddance too.