Big changes are coming to Discord next month. The company behind one of the most popular voice and chat services on the planet announced that all new and existing Discord users will soon have to prove their age via face scan or ID to gain access to the entirety of the app.
On February 9, Discord announced that as part of its “long-standing commitment to creating a safer” experience for teens, all Discord users worldwide will be shifted to a “teen-appropriate experience” by default. This change will happen in early March and once fully rolled out, it means users who can’t prove they are adults will lose access to a number of features and parts of Discord.
To prove you are an adult, Discord is going to make you either upload an image of a legal ID or share a video selfie to verify age. Discord promises that all legal documents will be deleted “in most cases” immediately after the user’s age is verified and claims all selfies will never leave the user’s device. It does warn that some users might need to submit multiple pieces of information to prove their age, and there will be a method to dispute an assigned age if Discord gets it wrong. And a new age inference model will “run in the background” and will “help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age.”
What features you’ll lose if you have a teen account on Discord
So what do you lose access to if you aren’t an adult on Discord? Quite a bit, actually, though you’ll still be able to use most of the apps basic features with some restrictions. Here’s what’s being blocked or gated for teen Discord users or people who don’t verify their age.
- Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting.
- Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.
- Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users.
- Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know.
- Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers.
“Nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users, which is why we are announcing these updates in time for Safer Internet Day,” said Savannah Badalich, head of product policy at Discord. “Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility. We design our products with teen safety principles at the core and will continue working with safety experts, policymakers, and Discord users to support meaningful, long term wellbeing for teens on the platform.”
This is similar to how Roblox has rolled out its age verification system and follows on the heels of various laws in the United States that force users to prove their age via face scan or ID to access pornographic websites. The age of the truly anonymous internet ended a long time ago, but this new era of face scans and age verification is something else entirely and a huge blow to privacy advocates and people who feel weird having to send a selfie to a computer to look at porn, visit a website, or send a message to a friend.
