Discord to require video selfies or government IDs to verify all users’ ages

Discord on Monday announced it will require all users globally to verify their ages by sharing video selfies or providing government IDs, a move that comes at a time when laws requiring age verification on social media platforms are multiplying.

In a blog post, Discord said the data it gathers will be deleted immediately after a user’s age is verified and that it will never leave the device.

A “phased global rollout” will begin in early March, the blogpost said, emphasizing that all users will have a “teen-appropriate experience by default.”

Late last year, Discord introduced a similar teen-by-default measure — meaning all users are assumed to be minors until they prove otherwise — in the U.K. and Australia.

Discord’s new rules are a response to pressure on the gaming industry around safety for minors. Platforms like Roblox are facing numerous lawsuits for allegedly jeopardizing children’s online safety. On January 28, the Federal Trade Commission held an event at which its chair urged companies across industries to speedily adopt age verification tools.

The new Discord policy was widely criticized in online gaming communities, where many users noted that a data breach in October had exposed the images of IDs belonging to roughly 70,000 users that had been uploaded for customer service reasons. . That breach impacted a third-party service Discord used to manage data. 

“This is how Discord dies,” said one user on a subreddit thread devoted to gaming. “Seriously, uploading any kind of government ID to a 3rd party company is just asking for identity theft on a global scale, let alone the privacy problem.”

“Goodbye, Discord,” said another.

The new default settings will blur out sensitive content for all users who have not verified that they are adults; allow only users who are age-assured as adults to access age-restricted channels, servers and app commands; and block anyone who is not age-verified from accessing direct messages from people they may not know.

“Nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users,” Discord head of product policy Savannah Badalich said in the blog post. “Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility.”

In December, Australia banned social media for all users under age 16. In recent weeks, officials in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain and France have said they are studying or will implement similar bans.

Discord is not a traditional social media platform, however, but a community where gamers can directly interact with each other.

Roblox, a game which allows similar direct engagement between users, is being sued by at least six state attorneys general for jeopardizing child safety. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has said the company is the “digital equivalent of a creepy cargo van lingering at the edge of a playground.”