Discord delays global rollout of age verification after refund

Discord is no longer planning to release age verification worldwide in March and is delaying the launch until the second half of 2026, the company he announced Tuesday.

Discord faced a backlash from users earlier this month after it announced that all users would be subject to “teenage ratings” by default until they were verified as adults.

The company explained on Tuesday that 90% of users will no longer need to verify their age and will be able to use Discord as usual, since most do not engage in age-restricted activities and the platform’s internal security can already determine the age of older users. This internal system works by looking at indicators such as the length of the account, whether the user has a payment method on file, and the types of servers they are on.

“Let me be up front: we knew this release would be controversial,” Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote in blog post to announce the change. “Anytime you launch something that involves recognition and validation, people have strong feelings. Rightfully so. In retrospect, we should have explained more about our goals and how the project works.”

“When this came up, many of you walked away thinking we needed face scans and IDs from everyone just to use Discord,” he continued. “It’s not what’s happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us that we’ve failed in our most important role: to be clear about what we’re doing and why.”

Discord says people in the top 10% of users who need to verify their age will be given options to do so. In the past, Discord has said that users can verify their age only by completing a facial age comparison or submitting an ID to a Discord partner. Now Discord says that before it expands age verification globally, it plans to introduce other verification methods, including a credit card verification method.

“If you choose not to verify, here’s what happens: you keep your account, your servers, your friends list, your DMs, and voice chats,” Vishnevskiy said in the post. “The only thing that changes is that you can’t get things that limit your age or change other things that are protected to protect young people.

The company also plans to publish information on its website about each verification vendor and their data practices, and to let you know exactly which vendors are being used. Additionally, it is now said to only work with vendors that verify the age of the user’s device.

Updates around vendors also come in the form of Discord met back by listing Persona, which is backed by the investment firm founded by Peter Thiel, as one of its partners in age verification. Thiel is the chairman and co-founder of Palantir, which has attracted controversy for its work US immigration rights etc federal programs. Persona has also attracted criticism from users for its use of third-party data and ties to governments.

Discord tries to isolate himself from Persona and is told Seaside yesterday that it “ran a limited trial of Persona in the UK where the warranty for years has already started and the trial is over.”

Discord has also come under fire for its age verification concept because it did so to be revealed Last October, about 70,000 users may have had sensitive data, such as photos of their official ID, exposed after hackers breached a third-party vendor that used the platform for age-related appeals. Discord says it will no longer work with the seller who violates the policy.