Discord announced on Monday that it will automatically switch accounts to a Youth age category, requiring some users of the popular social media service to verify their age if they want to access adult-restricted servers, avoid being blocked for flagged content or host live Discord 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 changes in early March. The Teen age setting will not only affect access to other servers but will move direct message requests to a new inbox, add alerts to friend alerts and blur content filtered as sensitive.
A Discord representative said the company believes most older users will not need to manually verify their age, noting that the company’s age determination model uses information such as account tenure, device and activity data to eliminate manual verification. A representative said that 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. 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 forums have been widely criticized for their effects on children, in some countries banning young people completely from social media.
In the case of Discord, the company said it will offer more than one option for age verification: sending an ID to a verification partner or using a facial age estimation tool. For others, that may not be clearly necessary.
“Discord will use its age index model, a new system that works in the background to help determine whether an account is an adult, without constantly 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 is launching a Teen Council, which will consist of about a dozen teenagers who will help advise the company on “what teens need, how to build meaningful connections, and what makes them feel safe and supported online.” Young people aged 13 to 17 can apply to the Teen Council until 1 May.
Discord used to ask people to verify their age to access age-restricted servers. Last year, a third-party vendor was hacked in an incident that exposed the identities of 70,000 age-verified users.
Who is next in age verification?
While Discord is the latest technology platform to take direct action in 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 requires social media companies to verify the age of childrenbut that number could grow as more state governments consider similar legislation.
The pressure to certify does not just come from local and federal laws; also responds to cases related to harm done to children through the use of online forums and tools such as chatbots.
You can expect age verification to become widespread, and for the companies that run these platforms to try to measure how they will use it to guess users’ ages or verify them, as Discord does.
“Discord’s “auto-renew” approach is interesting,” said Rivka Gewirtz Little, chief growth officer at Socure, which helps companies address online identity verification and fraud prevention. “In fact, if you can’t prove you’re an adult, be prepared to be protected as a child.”
Companies, said Little, will have to look at how to protect children without blocking access to adults unnecessarily, which can be difficult if more laws are passed on this issue. Little said it “shows how important it is that solutions are robust enough to address the various state-level and international restrictions, which differ in age-testing requirements.”
