Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
> Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been leaked after a cyber-attack.
However, their senior director states in this Verge article:
> 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.
Why they didn't do that the first time?
This is also contradicted by what Discord actually says:
> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
What are the non-most cases?
Everyone says this, including the TSA. But they never say they don't keep a hash, or an eigenvector of your biometric. Which is equally as important.
But they might be sending a copy to the NSA, similarly to how Alphabet, Yahoo, Apple, Meta etc. have been doing (PRISM program, part of the Snowden revelation [1]). The US has the legal mechanisms of requiring this to happen, secretly, such as NSLs [2].
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
[2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
I call it bollocks. Likely they have to keep it for audit and other purposes.
The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them, including attachments, rather than deleting them.
The purpose of things is what they do. They're an adtech user data collection company, they're not a user information securing company.
TL;DR: The IDs were used in age-related appeals. If someone's account was banned for being too young they have to submit an ID as part of the appeal. Appeals take time to process and review.
Discord has 200,000,000 users and age verification happens a lot due to the number of young users and different countries.
> We do not keep any information around
... "around"
*CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason)
This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.
I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible habits just because of this.
Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...
The cancel login flow didn't inform me that it found my login suspicious but the subscribe one did
I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids stuff...
And the community im interacting with is looking into self-hosted options.
The default experience will be the "teen" experience - they list what that entails - stuff that's flagged as adult/NSFW/etc. is blurred out until your age is verified, which for most(?) people will require ID or face scan. DMs/friend requests from people you don't know take some extra clicks to view. Fine.
It depends on how broad the definition of adult content ends up being I guess, but I'm simply not convinced that requiring ID to view "adult" content is the end of the world. If that means porn, I'm 100% OK with it, put porn behind gates. It has become far too easy to access. It's 2026 and we now have a generation of gooning addicts out there who never have actual sex and it's basically a guarantee that they won't find partners or start families any time soon, exacerbating an already problematic decline in the birth rate. This is not a version of society or anyone's "rights" that I care to defend. You want to goon, show ID. That's how it was before the Internet anyway.
On the other hand if it means any speech that the platform deems to be "controversial" will be blurred out then my response will not be to submit ID, I'll simply limit how I use the platform. Anonymous speech continues to matter and needs protection. But Discord was never the entity that was going to provide that protection.
I mean Discord is a gaming chat room. Expectations should be set by that fact. I don't need a gaming chat room to be NSFW, or even host i.e. political speech really. I get that people have used it for more than gaming, but it was always pretty clear what it was. If people don't like that this gaming chat room no longer supports other uses, they should switch to an alternative.
Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their identity.
Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are:
- Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade.
- Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for managing the firehose of busy communities. Or at least, a lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. :)
- Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc.
- It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that ~1500 people have successfully contributed code to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business.
- We are a values-focused organization (https://zulip.com/values/) where providing a public service is important to us all.
- Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE).
I'm happy to answer any questions.
Thank you!
Admittedly, it did take a day (less than), but once I got used to the interface Zulip provides. It's better than what I would have asked for! It's phenomenal software! The whole experience is better than anything else that exists. And everyone charging for the same features should feel embarrassed given how much better Zulip is!
Genuinely, it's impressive what y'all have created. So thank you!
I see that you have a "community" tier that's free and doesn't restrict notifications, but it's not clear to me exactly what's involved in proving that we should qualify.
The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit.
Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the Zulip team work in public is inspiring!
Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names.
A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghanis are still on Discord)
For me, a company that open sourced 70,000 IDs and ask for moooooore just weeks later is just a joke about the sharing economy
The problem isn't even for new users. Some users have over a decade of private hobbies and will now need to associate their governement ID to their profile. Discord pinky swears they ask but don't keep this time, which isn't enough.
Companies shouldn't be allowed to change such fundamental ToS after an account is created.
A month later, the account was suspended for supposedly breaking guidelines. I never posted a single message, never reacted to any posts.
They then required me to upload a video scan of my face to prove I was a person.
We aren’t quite at the end of the internet, but man I can really see the end of this journey coming sometime soon.
Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep it safe.
- Matrix
- Stoat, previously revolt (https://stoat.chat/)
- IRC + Mumble
- Signal
I wouldn't mind showing my ID to a person (in person), but there's no way I'm letting some company get a scan of my ID or passport to store in some giant database that's a rich target for hackers. Might as well give them access to all my bank accounts (Plaid) too.
(It sure would be nice if there were a national privacy law in the US.)
Also, it's illegal for companies to use facial recognition in my jurisdiction, so if I allowed them to "verify" me, they'd be breaking the law.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/07/discords-ipo-could-happen-...
It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives.
Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find quite a bit of information. My introduction to hash chains is for for age verification specifically: https://spredehagl.com/2025-07-14/
This is not about "i see gentila we ban". They're very vague about what is obscene, sticking to that level of a consistent definition, and they're very heavy handed in punishing.
They're introducing a highly restricted experience unless you hand over your details to either a "technology" (which that's very unclear about how honest they're being) or a company that has been caught for leaking sensitive details.
And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.
(here's part of it: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-rel... )
Are they shipping a video classifier model that can run on all the devices that can run Discord, including web? I've never heard of this being done at scale fully client-side. Which begs the question of whether the frames are truly processed only client-side...
You can move to $ALT_PLATFORM but unless it's self hosted they'll eventually have to enforce the same policy.
Direct your anger at the geriatrics in government who don't understand the risks of these laws first. You only have to watch the TikTok CEO's hearing in Congress to see how American politicians don't understand technology.
Any government that demands age verification from websites, should offer an eID system where each site can redirect you for the age verification. That way random sites don't have to worry about handling sensitive data.
As startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product. These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company.
Which is why we end up with decisions like OnlyFans hitting $1B / yr in revenue (with extreme profitability) off of porn and then deciding to ban porn, https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7...
Or, Digg deciding to kill its "bury" button and doing a radical "redesign" that made Reddit worth billions.
Unity's decision to update its pricing. Sonos' app "redesign" etc etc.
Corporate vampires will cheerfully slaughter your golden goose. Or, in the best case, severely cripple it.
Online age verification in the United Kingdom ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_in_the...)
Blaming Discord and switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'
I didn't even realise discord scans all the images that i send and recieve.
Also makes me wonder how people used to promote discord in the past. Big Brother is watching you.
Why isn’t this delivered via some sort of notification, menu, pop-up, etc? DMs seem prime for phishing
We should seriously go back to mailing lists and IRC as a standard for OSS. Everything else should be viewed as disposable.
I really just don't know what isn't "safe" for teens, so hopefully this will be pretty clear somewhere.
This clearly doesn't work and they're surely aware of it. Perhaps it's even intentional as a choice to give kids a way out, just trying to cover their own asses in regards to regulation.
I genuinely wonder which proportion of the users want access to age-restricted servers and channels...
Feels like it should be just fine not to verify the age.
I remember the internet from '99. Before facebook, before messangers.
People were communicating via usenet mailing groups - think online forum but via email - and it was quite common that they were not only signing their mails with full name, but often with a home address so others could send them postcards - think patreon for caveman.
IRC users had frequent local meetups and regulars could easily put a face behind an username.
I understand it was different time at different place, but oh boy, it was so much better.
Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control.
> The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules.
https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-...
What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?
One can easily implement a nationwide system like this. You can trust people in your own community. There are no central govt actors. In such a system no one has any knowledge of which service you are proving your identity/age for and the cryptographic approval can be done without any ids being exchanged. The input to the ombudsman is a hash you provide which he can sign with his key and send to a server, that can ask the ombudsman: "this thing you are signing is for age verification > 18, check persons ID and press confirm if that's the case". The ombudsman presses confirm after checking the id and you are done. Every city municipality can elect a local councilman/notaries to do this, for a small fees.
If true, there's little problem with just this from a privacy perspective, but that also makes it useless. Someone is going to make a browser extension to bypass/feed it a fake webcam feed.
> Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
However if they ask me to submit my ID to any third party, I'd sooner ditch discord. My default assumption is that this will get leaked, tying everyone's discord account to their real identity publicly. Discord seems to have halfway decent opsec, but I don't trust their "vendor partners" at all. I'll try submitting a fake ID, but if I get banned for it, then so be it.
Rules for thee, free love for me.
The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept above. Notably, they do not accept any privacy-protecting digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only implement national ID verifications where they receive a full birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow banks to attest to age-majority.
Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for / dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental privacy efforts — especially if one somehow got them classified as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available there.
Yes, this isn’t a scorched earth response. Every other thread of discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the budding age checks verification market at an early stage rather than trying to shut it down, here’s your roadmap to effecting real change on the matter. Good luck.
Then I remembered when I was a teen, thought about how I'd have reacted to this, and realized over the long term youth will rediscover old-school tools like IRC or migrate to new alternatives outside the claws of big corps and government.
And I felt a little better about the future of human civilization.
They’re not gonna use Slack or phpBB.
Even if you don't want to use the beta, your support to show it's a valuable use of our time would be great
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScL0ZVwWu8K-hJWrloq...
Why would any sane person allow this tracking and cross tracking and selling of our private info? Ridiculous for a commenting service.
However I think Discord is far too embedded for communities. Whether that be social or development. So I don't think we'll see a big exodus. Having teen mode be the default will just mean that NSFW flags on channels or content will be a death sentence for that board or community. Similar to how Reddits big push to shove NSFW into a corner has gone. There are obvious examples like adult content that are NSFW intentionally. But things like art or cosplay can easily be twisted as NSFW and it just shuts down the reach of these kinds of artists.
Unfortunately most people are dug in now and it takes absolute extreme actions to get people to move. The fact that X is still around should be clear evidence of that. It's draining over time but that kind of universal community has not be replicated. Just a couple different echo chambers.
I feel like age verification will come, there is no way around it (unlike ChatControl and the likes, age verification seems reasonably feasible and has a lot of political traction right now).
But I would rather have a privacy-preserving solution for that, e.g. from the government (which already knows my age).
But that doesn't meet the requirements which is proof of identity.
As a parent I pay for my child's phone and sim, and thus I have parental controls and I can limit access to discord, or youtube, or porn sites, both on the device level, on the sim card level, and on the home internet level.
I'm all for making parental controls easier to use, if you want to pass laws, enforce minimum standards on companies, encourage or mandate pan-company cooperation (why can't I control my child's microsoft account from my apple parental control page, or an EA account from a steam control page). I'd even be happy with sites being mandated to add say a DNS record saying "this is a site for over 18s only due to $reason", and then I, as the bill payer, can choose to allow that or not.
- ID verification to see porn on Discord.
- Also, some warnings to not befriend stangers.
Not very heavy handed, you can google porn anytime. I am not sure who this serves.
But there is a very real and dangerous situation where children and adolescents are using Discord with zero guardrails, constantly interacting with adults - many of whom are predators. This is happening every day. Millions of children around the world "meet people" playing games online, take the conversation to Discord, and then get brought into a very dark world online that their brains are simply not ready for.[^1]
I don't like the idea of blanket face scans/ID scans with that data stored in perpetuity - but age verification of some kind is a must IMO.
[1]: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/its-not-just-a-game-anymore
I use Discord for chat and voice calls since that is what I expect from a chat app, but the amount of companies that have built their community / knowledge base / support system around Discord is worrying. You know they can just delete that, right?
I'll continue to use Discord for chat until prompted to put my face in the hole :)
Protect the kids puritanism is on max level right now, throw in some future terrorist attack or political issues that scare people enough like they fear TikTok and the internet will be fully controlled.
I chose the face scan option as I simply don't trust most providers when it comes to uploading my ID. Countless data breaches have happened over the years where driver's license and passport details have been stolen from databases.
For those unaware, a driver's license is often referred to as the "golden ticket" for identity thieves. A single license usually contains all the information needed to open credit in that person's name.
Yes, they will claim their process is super secure, and they take security seriously. But then again, they all say that.
Combined with recent AUS,UK laws mandating the same across most online services - im sceptical that even opensource offering could evade te dragnet.
We already knew that any ID verification for kids would inevitable mean everyone gets carded then sorted. With this AI profiling essentailly piggybacking on the likes of Facebooks decades long shadow profile shenanigans , and the recent Ring revalation that theyare essentially doing the same via their cameras. Its a bleak panopticaon that has all the essential building blocks in place.
I personally don't find ease-of-use to be worth the price of my privacy but most people are more than happy to sell themselves out piecemeal in the form of data until there's nothing left but a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet to attest to their ever having existed.
And this will reduce spam from random accounts. Will see if it remains usable without uploading my Id.
Shouldn't have been using a free product anyway. Committed the crime of convenience and paid with my telemetry. At least I stopped.
HN, you my only fren.
Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?
> use facial age estimation
Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?
> submit a form of identification
If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in one country there is no process for that.
> On-device processing
Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.
I would love to hear a testimony from someone who finds their Discord servers to be edifying or uplifting. What worked?
People's livelihoods and safety are threatened when there's people's personally identifying information associated with their Discord chats - even if linked by "anonymous" identifiers.
Imagine your photo ID next to the horniest thing you've stated next to some random asshole on the Internet.
Discord has no moral right to make such a dramatically consequential decision about the personal privacy of its users in jurisdictions where such age verification tech is not mandatory.
(not affiliated with the project, just really want to see it succeed)
[1] https://stoat.chat/ [2] https://github.com/stoatchat/for-ios
All of my use is primarily professional and gaming and has no age concerns
There are plenty of approaches to this, and I won't spam this comment with all the thoughts I have on the subject. But my frustration is people want things like "cancel your nitro subscription" well I don't have one. What else? It's just small things that will not impact anything. Every service out there will require this sort of verification soon. Being angry doesn't stop it. Even voting doesn't seem effective to me. But better solutions might.
If they could verify your age as accurately as a store attendant a physical store could, what else could they want? And if that could be done without giving random websites any identifying information about yourself, wouldn't that be better than this mess? Two things can be done, you can resist this nonsense while supporting alternatives to it.
The same thing could be done for social media and messaging. People should hold control over their own content and the application layer should just be content organizers and consumers.
Use Discord with a throw-away account. Create a character in GTA 5 on your laptop and show its face (in "selfie" mode) to the web-camera on another computer with Discord open. All face scan checks so far gladly accept it. Instagram has been requiring occasional face checks for ages already.
No privacy loving person will comply with Discord on this matter.
Discord is doomed to only have weak compliant users on its platform.
Your IDs and biometric data for most services is sent to multiple companies, governments, and who ever else comes asking, armed only with a piece of paper. It is never deleted. It is used to create a profile of you and your activities.
Never use an account if possible.
Now those same people are complaining they're gonna have to submit their faces to discord. Which will eventually be used to prosecute or commit fraud. I'm left wondering if "tech enthusiasts" are ever actually correct.
The alternative is having to give your ID to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and all the other bad actors...
I made a lot of friends on those communities growing up, and it inspired me to go into software because I saw how it brought people together.
And I still sorely miss the WhatCD forums. While I didn’t make any friends there, it shaped my early experiences with music which still reverberates through me today.
Even with the reinvigoration of new ideas from LLMs, tech feels like it has been languishing for well over a decade at this point. The playbook is to disrupt traditional industry at a loss, then enshittify when competitors are gone. A lot of tech plays really feel like some form of: bring the yellow pages into the digital realm and overcharge for facilitating that access. Finding a firm that even uses AI outside of a chatbot UX is rare.
On one hand, I'm not surprised.
But on the other hand-- I would be terrified to be in charge of a company who needed to make this ask. It's just such a big deal, such an important bit of information to protect from hacks.
I hope they lose most of their customer base. But I'm terrified they won't.
The gradual erosion of privacy is no longer gradual.
Yay to further fragmentation:D
For example, if we are in a server for coding, maybe we will have to use zoom or google meet as a stopgap. Curious if others have better alternatives.
Mandatory age checks with biometric or ID data can create long-term privacy and reuse risks that the ecosystem has not fully reckoned with yet.
phpBB never made me scan my face.
So... what now? I just have my life literally turned upside down because of a greedy surveillance state?
> [verify to] Speak in a stage channel.
My understanding is non-stage voice channels are E2E encrypted, and Discord retains no recordings, whereas stage channels are not. Is this a liability thing—Discord not wanting to have voice recordings of non-adults?
What stops kids (or anyone) from using "AI" (which they are already using to a great extent)?
I bet you could bypass it without any video, too, while we are at it.
These companies do not do this under external pressure from the state, they do this because it benefits and consolidates their power as well.
It's bricks for their castle wall.
Corporations should not be considered a separate entity from the state. Corporations form state power. This doesn't mean they are always in-line with the state, but that they lead the state as a block, as a class, defending their common interests.
Policing is one of them.
And often is there for existing apps, that things like this can happen
So people might take stock of existing apps like Discord that they might want to migrate from
There's this interesting arc of growth for apps which are successful. At first users love it, company grows, founders get rich, they hire expensive people to develop the product and increase revenue until eventually the initial culture and mission is replaced by internal politics and processes.
Software starts getting features which users don't want or need, side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth|...
Users become tools in the hands of the app they initially used as a tool. This model worked well so far and built some of the biggest companies in history.
AI could make this business model less effective. Once a piece of software becomes successful and veers off into crap territory, people will start cloning it, keeping only the features that made that software successful initially. Companies who try to strong arm their users will see users jump ship, or rather, de-board on islands.
At least I hope this will be the case.
Facial video estimates or submit an id card.
Option 3: if we analyze all of your data we have and see you are not going to bed at 8pm for middle school, you get adult status.
It's just a small step ahead of "phone number required" auth.
You can choose to be respectful of people who have valid reasons for not providing ID
But you want that sweet IPO money (as stated elsewhere in this thread). You don't actually care about the internet and how anonymity is a cool thing for certain vulnerable groups
All these tech CEOs should face prison time and I'm not joking. They've displayed a complete laissez faire attitude to all of these concerns
HN User Chat: https://signal.group/#CjQKICCPlygJ6YXA0jqqOcE0K3AHovCOX4WKEN...
If you follow me and want to join my friends-and-associates one, I’m @sneak.07 on Signal.
Until someone offers up something better, I take these types of initiatives from social media platforms as huge wins. Ignoring the problem will not make it better. We've been ignoring it for about 20 years now, and it's only gotten worse.
I've seen way too many governments / companies use "protect the children" as a way to try and push overreaching garbage policy, however I think this one actually might help.
That said, depends on exact details of how they want to do this. We'll see how it goes.
I use Signal but the UI is very different from Discord.
I've had very mixed experiences with Element + Matrix, Element keeps crashing on mobile, and while voice chat kinda exists in Element it's not been great imho.
I looked into hosting Rocket.chat, Zullip, and Mattermost but from what I recall voice + mobile were either missing or paywalled at a per-user price.
Any recommendations?
Why doesn't Discord require ALL users to upload their faces to prove that they are at least 13 years old and eligible to use the service?
It seems to me that the "logical" solution to this is some sort of local key like "sudo" that the user enters/has access to. This key is on a cookie or request or something that says "This request is being done by a verified adult" and then the website goes "cool here's your data". If the request does not have it, then the website says "Sorry you need one of these keys/permissions to access".
I see this as elegant because like modern IDs, YES THEY COULD GET AROUND IT, but at least it gives parents and users who want to abide and try the ability. Kids get fake id's, they get stuff they shouldn't. So long as audits show that the businesses are trying to catch this and punishing those who ignore procedures properly, things are "fine".
How infeasible is this from a coding perspective? I get that we're fucking with standards here, but I figured it would make most sane users and companies happy. Companies don't have to keep PII, just a log of "yes this access from this IP was approved, but we discovered is was used falsely and banned that key", and users have a tool that's setup once locally (or refreshed when you want a new key).
I guess you'd need some way to authenticate these as if it's too easy to spoof whats the point, but it strikes me as leagues better of "store everyone's colonic map"
How off base am I here? Is the theory somewhat sound or is this just dead from the ground up?
That presumably includes selfies?
That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person must first record a facial age estimation video or upload identification documents.
That seems dystopian.
1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
This is transparently about spying on people, not "protecting children". The real world doesn't require you to show your ID to every business you frequent, or every advertiser you walk by. Someone can yell a swear word on the sidewalk, and not everyone within ear shot has to show ID.
Platforms need to adapt to how they're used (or how they want to be used). The amount of child exploitation that happens on Discord should make any civilized person working in that company uncomfortable, and its natural and good to want to do something about it, not out of external or governmental pressure, but because you yourself can see the dashboards and logs, and can see what's happening.
There's a needle of difference between a government mandating identity verification, and a private organization saying this is how we want to run our company. Threading that needle is living in a free and safe society. If we can't thread it, and we fall to one side or the other, then you have to choose whether you prefer safety or freedom. Personally, I'd rather have both.
I don't know what people need as lesson. We already have so many FLOW options, and yet they are so many running after the last shiny ready for enshitification ready to go platform.
Expect them to sell your whole life to whatever party with enough money to throw at their face.
Enshittification and profit-maxing strikes down yet another decent piece of software. Rest in piss.
Every time the topic of ID for 18+ content comes up, the entire internet melts down over "big brother" and "privacy", yet no one flinches at presenting ID for alcohol at the store. And further more, nobody offers an alternative solution the problem. Status quo isn't acceptable. "Kids will always find a way to bypass measures/access their porn", is also not an acceptable answer.
We as a society need to do something about the unprecedented levels of porn addiction in today's youth. "Enter your date of birth" prompts are performative and do nothing.
I will say I am usually the first person to oppose any sort of government overreach, I am very pro privacy.
I believe the energy put into the criticism and boycott of Discord should be put into finding solutions for verifying ID in a secure and private manner online. Something like Apple Pay for IDs?
I kind of hate it, but honestly it’s had minimal impact on me and my usage of these services if I’m being real.
Watch:
A) Discord relaxing its rule because of mass exodus B) People moving elsewhere where no personal information is required
If it was only friend groups it would kill them for sure, we've seen that many times, but given the absurd amount many large online communities on Discord, I'd wager they can force it down and be relatively unscathed.
They played the long game - they provided a good service for 10 years, and got REALLY big before they started the enshittification process.
not to mention the recent prevalence of so called sextortion on teenagers.
disturbing stuff, hope the kibosh gets put on all these policies and their is a public push-back, but that is really seeming like a fantasy.
Now that the governments are scared to deal with it, the Governments are scrambling. They are slapping a "Band-Aid" on a gunshot wound and it's all bullshit.
Kids lie. They fake the age. They use VPNs.
The Corporate Reality is that Meta, X, TikTok want them to.
During the pandemic, I was on a Discord server for folks to socialize and blow off steam about the whole situation. Yes, there were some anti-vaxx wackos, but overall the place was civil and balanced, and I met some interesting people through it. We cracked jokes and it was a little bit of fun in a tough time.
One day I came to discover that Discord had banned the server for allegedly violating... something. I wish I had written down everyone's emails because I permanently lost contact with a bunch of friends in an instant.
I never signed in to Discord again, in spite of times where some other social group wanted to use it. I vowed never to use Discord again. Fuck those guys and the Teslas they rode in on. I hope this ID verification thing is another big step towards their irrelevancy.
Fuck you
do we really need to do this EVERY FUCKING SERVICE that we would like to use ????
Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to respect privacy and deliver a safer experience while minimizing friction for adults.
Hey folks –
I’ve been on Discord since very early 2016 and actually joined the company in 2017. Safety is one of my areas, so today’s announcement on our blog is something I’ve been pretty involved with. I’ve always cared about Discord's approach to privacy (E2EE for A/V was another of my projects here), so I figured I’d add some more context to today's news.
I can say confidently that the vast majority of people will never see age verification. I say this because we launched age assurance in the UK and Australia in 2025, and we have some pretty good data on this now. The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults.
And if you are one of the smaller subset of folks that we can't definitively pre-identify, then still, you only have to do it if you're accessing age-restricted servers or channels, or changing certain settings. That's really not most users. (Altho... might be more Redditors, tbh.)
Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That's a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally. That'll work for a bunch of users who aren't pre-identified as adults. But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you're right that has some risk. We're doing what we can to minimize this by working with our range of partners (who are different partners than the data leak you read about), and if it's any help, we learned a lot internally from the last issue. But I get if that doesn't necessarily inspire more confidence.
Anyway, we’ll be sharing more next month as we get closer to the global roll out about the system, including the technology behind it in March. I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details.
And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!
* SCREEN Act age verification with huge implications for all online privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g&list=PLu4srHCWJr...
* Abolishing Section 230, the law that protects platforms like this from being sued for user content (just published today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqt8vrtP-U&list=PLu4srHCWJr...
* UK online safety act (it's not just the U.S.) - interview with the lawyer defending 4chan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3PGp9RhTw&list=PLu4srHCWJr...