Discord to Implement Age Verification Next Month Following Recent Data Breach

Weekly updates, stories from your favorite gaming communities, and more

You’re now subscribed

Your newsletter sign-up was successful

Looking to add more newsletters?

Get your weekly dose of everything you need to know about the games you love, upcoming titles we think you’ll enjoy, and stories from the vibrant communities that support them.

Our dedicated GTA 6 newsletter delivers breaking news, insider insights, and rumor breakdowns from seasoned experts in the field.

From the minds behind Edge comes a weekly newsletter focused on the gaming industry, featuring in-depth analysis from skilled writers, advice from industry professionals, and a glimpse into what’s on the horizon.

Tech enthusiasts, join our free tech newsletter for a weekly roundup of the latest innovations, cutting-edge gadgets, and much more.

Subscribe to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we keep you updated on Nintendo’s latest console, share news, and recommend must-play games each week.

Stay informed with a weekly digest of essential movie and TV news delivered straight to your inbox. From exclusive trailers to interviews and reviews, we’ve got you covered.

Get exclusive previews, competitions, and details about special events every month!

After initial regional rollouts, Discord has announced global child protection settings that will set all users to a “teen-by-default” status until they verify their age through ID or a selfie. This change will affect “all new and existing users worldwide” starting in March 2026, with a phased rollout.

Discord’s announcement reflects a growing trend in age-based online protections aimed at enhancing child safety.

Once classified as a teen on Discord, users may need to complete an age-verification process to modify certain settings or access sensitive content.

This includes filters for “truly adult content,” as noted by product policy head Savannah Badalich, along with “age-gated spaces” such as specific channels and servers, and chat for live “stage” events. Direct messages from unknown users will be sent to a separate inbox, and friend request notifications will include a warning prompt.

To bypass these age restrictions, users can opt for facial age estimation or submit identification to Discord’s vendor partners, with additional options expected in the future.

The age estimation process involves running “video selfies” through AI to estimate the user’s age, with Discord assuring that these selfies “never leave a user’s device.”

ID verification will be managed by third-party vendors, and Discord states that “identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly – in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”

The phrase “in most cases” raises some eyebrows, especially considering a breach in October 2025 involving a now-former vendor, where Discord acknowledged that “approximately 70,000 users … may have had government-ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.”

“This was not a breach of Discord, but rather a breach of a third-party service provider, 5CA, that we used to support our customer service efforts,” Discord clarified at the time. However, as the company expands its ID-collecting verification globally, scrutiny over age-related appeal processing is likely to increase, along with the amount of user data flowing through Discord’s systems.

When Discord introduces “more options” for age verification, we can expect an “age inference model,” a new system designed to help determine if an account belongs to an adult without always requiring age verification. This appears to be another AI-driven effort to assess user age, though it remains unclear how accurately this model will function. Should we start sharing our experiences with lower back pain and taxes just to be safe?

Badalich acknowledged the potential for users to leave Discord due to this change, which seems to be a reasonable conclusion based on online reactions. “We do expect that there will be some sort of hit there,” she stated, “and we are incorporating that into our planning. We’ll find other ways to bring users back.”

The UK’s controversial online safety law mandates that Discord users must scan their faces to verify their age, and intriguingly, Hideo Kojima’s own Death Stranding 2 has provided privacy-conscious players with a workaround.