Discord hears you. It gets your concerns. It wants to win back your trust. That’s the message from cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who announced the company’s controversial new age-verification requirements will be delayed, but not reversed, as it works to try to better explain what’s happening to its millions of users. “We’ve made mistakes,” he wrote.
Vishnevskiy says he’s just like you, getting off work and hopping on voice chat with friends while playing games like Baby Steps and Arc Raiders. Leveraging his gamer cred, the executive tried to quell the recent backlash while making clear that nothing is fundamentally changing about the age-verification rollout coming, other than the timing and optics. For Discord, the issue appears to be a failure to properly communicate the policy rather than the policy itself.
“In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works,” he wrote in today’s update. “The way this landed, many of you walked away thinking we’re requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use Discord. That’s not what’s happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we’re doing and why.”
Vishnevskiy continued, “We know many of you believe the right answer is not to do this at all. We hear you.” He then went on to insinuate that Discord’s hands are tied as new regulation rolls out across more countries and U.S. states. The company promises more transparency about its vendors and processes, but otherwise nothing about the age-verification rollout is fundamentally changing other than the timing.
Here’s how the newly delayed rollout will work as outlined on Discord’s website.
We’re delaying our global rollout to the second half of 2026. Where we have legal obligations, we will continue to meet them, but we will only expand globally after we’ve done the following:
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Adding more verification options. We already had alternatives in development, including credit card verification. We’ll complete and expand those before scaling globally so you have more options you’re comfortable with.
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Vendor transparency. We’ll document every verification vendor and their practices on our website, and make it clear in the product who each vendor is. We’ve also set a new requirement: any partner offering facial age estimation must perform it entirely on-device. If they don’t meet that bar, we won’t work with them.
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A new spoiler channel option. We know many communities use age-restricted channels not for adult content, but for topics people prefer to engage with on their own terms: spoilers, politics, and heavier conversations. We’re building a dedicated spoiler channel option so communities don’t have to age-gate their server just to give members that choice.
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A technical blog post before global launch. We’ll publish a detailed post explaining how our automatic age determination systems work, including the signal categories and privacy constraints. So you can evaluate our approach for yourselves.
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Age assurance data in our transparency reports. We’ll include how many users were asked to verify, what methods they used, and how often our automated systems handled it without any user action.
The apologetic backpedaling comes after weeks of Discord users pushing back on new requirements that would require some users to submit photos and IDs to the gaming chat platform if its AI tools decide you’re not over the age of 18 and you try to access “adult” content servers. A prior “experiment” with this new policy that was implemented in the UK became a lightning rod for some frustrated users when it was revealed that one of the vendors involved in the process, a firm called Persona, was backed by funds from surveillance company Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel.
Discord later said it cut ties with the vendor and that it has new safeguards in place to prevent user data from being hacked as it accidentally was last fall. But the bubbling cauldron of AI surveillance, data security concerns, and Discord’s reportedly impending IPO has left even some of its most hardcore users skeptical.