“Eugh,” we said, back in 2025 when Discord began “an experiment” in which some users were asked to scan their faces or IDs in order to verify that they were old enough to access sensitive content. But experiments, generally speaking, are tests, and tests, generally speaking, are something you do in pursuit of a particular goal, and now here we are not quite a year later and Discord is preparing to roll out face scanning and ID checks for everyone, everywhere, all the time.
You’ll still be able to use Discord if you opt not to participate in this particular surveillance nightmare, but beginning in early March you’ll be locked into a “teen-appropriate experience” if you don’t. That means content filters, age gates, the inability to speak in “stage channels”—essentially channels that enable a group of people to converse while an audience listens—and restrictions on direct message and friend requests.
“Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device,” today’s announcement says, adding,”Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly—in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”
You may recall it was one of those vendor partners who leaked an estimated 70,000 age verification photos in October 2025—just four months ago—along with names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses: “A pretty comprehensive mess,” as PC Gamer’s Jeremy Laird put it at the time.
Despite significant public pushback, other countries and regions are following suit with their own regime of age checks and definitions of “sensitive” content, which in some cases has led to bans and blocks: Australians under 16 are banned from social media, for instance—although not from Steam, illustrating the fundamentally arbitrary nature of the whole thing. In the US, the Kids Online Safety Act will lead platforms to over-censor, the EFF warned in 2025, because “the list of harms in KOSA’s ‘duty of care’ provision is so broad and vague that no platform will know what to do regarding any given piece of content.”
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