Discord announced on Monday that it will change accounts to default to a Teen age category, requiring some who use the popular communication service to verify their age if they want to access adult-restricted servers, avoid having age-flagged content blocked or host Stage livestreaming events on the platform.
It’s a big move for Discord, which has more than 200 million monthly active users. Discord will begin rolling out the changes in early March. The Teen age setting will not only affect access to some servers but will also route direct message requests to a new inbox, add warnings to friend alerts and blur content that has been filtered as sensitive.
A Discord representative said the company believes most adult users won’t have to manually verify their age, noting that the company’s age-inference model uses information such as account tenure, device and activity data to eliminate the manual verification. The representative said Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process.
Discord is just the latest company to add age verification to its platform. Over the last year, YouTube, Roblox, ChatGPT and others have added technology to verify or estimate a person’s age to protect younger users from adult content or unwanted contact. Online platforms have come under fire for their effects on children, with some countries banning young people from social media platforms entirely.
In the case of Discord, the company said it will offer more than one option for age verification: either submitting ID to a verification partner or using a facial age-estimation tool. For some, that may not be explicitly required.
“Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age,” the company said. “Some users may be asked to use multiple methods if more information is needed to assign an age group.”
In addition to the service changes, Discord said it’s launching a Teen Council, which will consist of about a dozen teenagers who will help advise the company on “what teens need, how they build meaningful connections, and what makes them feel safe and supported online.” Teens aged 13 to 17 can apply for the Teen Council until May 1.
Discord had already been asking people to verify their age to access age-restricted servers. Last year, a third-party vendor was hacked in an incident that exposed IDs for 70,000 who’d been age-verified.
Who’s next for age verification?
While Discord is the latest tech platform to take definitive action on addressing how it handles having users under the age of 18, it’s unlikely to be the last. Fewer than a dozen states have laws on the books requiring social media companies to age-verify minors, but that number could increase with many state governments considering similar legislation.
The pressure to verify doesn’t just come from local and federal rules; it’s also in response to lawsuits related to harm done to children via online platforms and through tools such as chatbots.
You can expect age verification to spread, and for companies that own these platforms to try to weigh how they’re going to implement guessing the ages of users or verifying them, as Discord is doing.
“Discord’s “teenager by default” approach is an interesting one,” said Rivka Gewirtz Little, chief growth officer at Socure, which helps companies deal with online identity verification and fraud prevention. “Essentially if you can’t prove you’re adult, be prepared to be safeguarded as a child.”
Companies, Little said, will have to navigate how to safeguard children without blocking off access to adults unnecessarily, could could get tougher are more laws are passed around the issue. Little said it “reflects how important it is for solutions to be nimble enough to address a wide range of state-level and international restrictions, which vary in requirements for how to technically assess age.”
