TL;DR
- Discord will soon treat all accounts as teen-friendly by default unless it’s confident you’re of an adult age.
- Access to age-restricted servers and features may require video selfie age checks or ID verification.
- The move echoes YouTube’s recent age-verification push, which frustrated many users.
Last year, YouTube made it clear that if it couldn’t tell whether you were an adult, it would start treating your account as if it weren’t. Some users shrugged and verified their age, while others refused on principle and suddenly found large parts of YouTube locked behind kid-friendly restrictions. Discord is now set to head down a similar path.
Announced in a press release today, and starting in early March, Discord will roll out what it calls a teen-by-default experience worldwide. Unless the platform is confident you’re an adult, your account will come with tighter limits by default. That includes losing access to age-restricted servers and channels, being unable to speak in Stage channels, and seeing sensitive content blurred. Messages from people you don’t know will also be filtered into a separate inbox.
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To remove those limits, Discord users may be asked to verify their age. The platform says this can be done either through facial age estimation of a video selfie or by submitting an ID, which is checked by a third-party verification partner. The company frames the process as privacy-conscious — selfies are processed on-device, documents are deleted quickly, and your age status isn’t visible to others. In some cases, Discord may rely on an internal age-inference system instead, meaning not everyone will be asked to verify manually.
Discord can’t be blamed for wanting stronger protections for teens, and it’s building on similar measures it already rolled out in places like the UK and Australia. Still, as YouTube has already shown, moves like this tend to frustrate adults who don’t like being nudged toward face scans or ID checks just to keep using a service the way they’ve always used it. That sentiment could be compounded on Discord, which has a stronger community approach than YouTube.
Discord says most people won’t notice much of a change, especially if they’re not interacting with adult-only spaces. But for those who do run into the new limits, the choice is clear: prove you’re an adult, or accept a more restricted version of the platform.
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