Discord delays its age verification, admits it knew the rollout was "going to be controversial" and that it "failed at its most basic job"

After constant pushback from its users, popular chat platform Discord is pulling back on plans to introduce a "global age assurance" process, admitting in a statement that the company "failed at our most basic job" of "explaining what we're doing and why." The global rollout now won't happen until the second half of 2026, with a technical blog offering a deeper dive into the automatic age determination systems before they're set to go live. We'll also get to see things like "how many users were asked to verify" and "what methods they used" when the rollout does actually happen.

Penned by Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, a lengthy statement posted to the platform's official blog starts with the head honcho talking about why he built Discord and how he still hops into a voice chat with his friends to "watch one of them spend hours raging at Baby Steps," or play Arc Raiders "until something hilarious and memorable happens." Why the relatively vague preamble? Well, it's all in an effort to demonstrate how he understands why the world was upset about the plan to roll out age verification measures on the platform that's become one of the biggest gathering hubs for gamers around the world.

"Many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads," he says. "That's not what's happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we're doing and why. That's on us."

Vishnevskiy goes on to explain that while plans to roll out certain aspects of the global age assurance process have been postponed, they will still go ahead. "For 90%+ of users, nothing changes," he states, before explaining that Discord already approximates your age range by "using the same category of account-level signals: how long your account has existed, whether you have a payment method on file, what types of servers you're in, and general patterns of account activity."

For the other 10% or so of users the system suspects might be underage, "we'll give you options, designed to tell us only your age and never your identity," Vishnevskiy says. Decide you don't want to give any of that sort of information, and you'll only be locked out of "certain default safety settings" and "age-restricted content."

Scroll a little further down the announcement, though, and we see the kicker. While Vishnevskiy states that the company will "document every verification vendor and their practices" on the Discord website, the issue of verification vendors being used at all still very much exists. The only real difference is that Discord is promising to make these vendors public knowledge and assures us that "any partner offering facial age estimation must perform it entirely on-device."

Look, accountability is better than nothing, but does this really address the bigger issues Discord users have with the platform's age verification plans? The move sparked outrage due to Persona's (the system Discord planned on using) funding ties to Palantir, the mass surveillance system utilized by various government and military organizations, including ICE. It has since distanced itself from the Peter Thiel-led company.

The social media comments would suggest that no, people aren't wholly convinced. Still, with the planned rollout pushed back by at least four months, there's still plenty of time for people to get their point across.