discord global age verification delayed to second half of 2026

[Flit]

discord has announced (archive) that the global rollout of age verification has been delayed to the second half of this year.

let me make this abundantly clear: this is not a walkback. a walkback would be to simply not do this. what this actually is, is a poor attempt to claw back the users who have joined and make them think it's a walkback.

this changes none of my plans. i will still be closing my discord server for a week. i also still encourage others to investigate and actually try alternative platforms.

i will now go over quotes from the article. for the rest of this post, when i say "you", i'm referring to discord.

Let me be upfront: we knew this rollout was going to be controversial. Any time you introduce something that touches identity and verification, people are going to have strong feelings. Rightfully so. In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works.

maybe, maybe not. the initial announcement was very poor. the updates made things clearer, yes, but not in a way that made anyone like it more, because you know and even acknowledge that this is a bad decision.

it's also very telling that the big mistake in your eyes was the lack of clarity, and not the fact that you're pushing an update that nobody is okay with.

On top of that, many of you are worried that this is just another big tech company finding new ways to collect your personal data. That we're creating a problem to justify invasive solutions. I get that skepticism. It's earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry. But that’s not what we’re doing.

he goes on to say what they claim to be actually doing. the problem is i can't trust any of it because we have no way of independently verifying how discord works, because the app and service aren't even source-available.

Over 90% of users will never need to verify their age to continue using Discord exactly as they do today. This is powered in part by our internal safety systems, which can already make an age determination for many adult users without any user action. We'll publish the methodology behind this in a technical blog post before we launch globally.

at this point i have to assume they simply do not understand the logical problem with this statement. "we don't need IDs from most of you because we already know you're an adult." ok... then why do you need to do this to begin with?

It does not read your messages, analyze your conversations, or look at the content you post.

Osprey may not, but other systems certainly do.

it is not a secret that if you say that you're under 13, even jokingly, your account is automatically banned.

also, discord scans attachments and replaces messages with a food recipe if the attachment is thought to contain a virus. funny, maybe, but they have to be able to scan every attachment to do this. (granted, you are told that attachments are scanned in the app.)

regardless of the merits, the whole "we don't read your messages" thing you've been saying is a lie. yes, you do, even if not for the purposes of age verification.

We know many of you are skeptical of how we handle partnerships, and the security incident last year involving our third-party customer service provider only adds to that skepticism. To be clear, we do not use that vendor for age assurance. In fact, we no longer work with them at all, and we've taken the lessons from that incident seriously.

for the record, you've already told us that you don't work with them anymore. it is good to reiterate that.

i don't believe for even a second that you've taken the lessons from that incident seriously, though, considering the decision to partner with k-ID and Persona for age verification afterwards. this is a load of horseshit. (and no, cutting ties with Persona later is irrelevant here.)

One of those evaluations was with Persona, a company used by platforms like Roblox and Reddit. In January, we ran a limited test with Persona in the UK only. After completing the test, we decided not to move forward with them, and consistent with our privacy policy, all data was deleted after completing verification. We’ve set a new bar for any partner offering facial age estimation, including that it must be performed entirely on-device, meaning your biometric data never leaves your phone. Persona did not meet that bar.

and also ties to Jeffrey Epstein and mass global surveillance, but we'll just not talk about any of that i guess.

not mentioning any of this is a huge part of the reason why i can't trust discord, by the way. there is no fucking way they haven't heard about this, so not mentioning it is entirely irresponsible.

sidenote: vmfunc's website fucking rules

We heard you, and we want to get this right. So here's what's happening:

We’re delaying our global rollout to the second half of 2026.

*LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER SOUND*

the rest of this corpospeak isn't worth commenting on.