Discord no longer plans to roll out age verification globally in March and is delaying the rollout until the second half of 2026, the company was announced Tuesday.
Discord faced backlash from users earlier this month after it announced that all users would be placed in a “teen-friendly experience” by default until they were verified as adults.
The company clarified on Tuesday that 90% of users will not need to verify their age and will be able to continue using Discord as usual, as most do not engage with age-restricted content and the platform’s internal security systems can already determine the age of many adult users. These internal systems work by looking at clues like how long an account has been around, whether the user has a payment method on file, and what types of servers they’re on.
“Let me be upfront: we knew this mood would be controversial,” Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote on blog post announcing the change. “Anytime you introduce something that touches identity and verification, people are going to have strong feelings. Rightfully so. In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works.”
“As this has happened, many of you have come away thinking that we require face scans and ID uploads from everyone to use Discord,” he continued. “It’s not that it’s happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us that we’ve failed at our most basic job: to clearly explain what we’re doing and why.”
Discord says that people in the 10% of users who need to verify their age will have options to do so. Previously, Discord stated that users could only verify their age by either completing a facial age estimate or submitting an ID to Discord’s partner vendors. Now Discord says that before it expands age verification globally, it plans to introduce additional verification methods, including a credit card verification option.
“If you choose not to verify, that’s exactly what happens: you keep your account, your servers, your friends list, your DMs, and your voice chat,” Vishnevskiy said in the post. “The only thing that changes is that you won’t be able to access age-restricted content or change some default security settings designed to protect teenagers. Nothing else about your Discord experience changes.”
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The company also plans to post information on its website about each verification vendor and its data practices and clearly identify which vendor is being used. Additionally, it now says it will only work with vendors that perform the age verification process entirely on the user’s device.
Change around vendors also comes as Discord faced backlash to list Persona, which is backed by an investment firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, as one of its age verification partners. Thiel is chairman and co-founder of Palantir, which has sparked controversy for its work with US immigration enforcement and more federal surveillance programs. Persona also drew criticism from users for its use of third-party data and partnerships with governments.
Discord tries to distance himself from the Persona and said The Verge yesterday that it “ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age verification had previously started and that test has since been completed”.
Discord also faced backlash for its plans for age verification because it had show up last October that around 70,000 users may have had sensitive data, such as their government ID photos, exposed after hackers breached a third-party vendor the platform used for age appeals. Discord says it no longer works with the vendor involved in this breach.
