Discord delay global rollout of age verification to improve transparency and add more options

In the ongoing crazy saga of the internet getting gated behind new age verification laws, Discord are putting on the brakes temporarily.

Writing in a new blog post Discord CTO & Co-Founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy mentioned they "knew this rollout was going to be controversial" and that "In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works" and that with the way it was explained resulting in people thinking everyone had to go through age checks that they "failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we're doing and why".

For regions where it is already law that they have to do age checks, because they count as social media, the current rules will be sticking. So that's the UK, Australia and soon Brazil too. And naturally, as more countries roll out these required age checks - those will be forced as well.

Vishnevskiy mentions again, that "For 90%+ of users, nothing changes. Most users never access age-restricted content or change their default safety settings". There's only specific times it will be needed to access certain content and options.

For now, the rest of the world won't have to do anything at all. The global rollout will only happen once these points have been met:

1. Adding more verification options. We already had alternatives in development, including credit card verification. We’ll complete and expand those before scaling globally so you have more options you’re comfortable with.
2. Vendor transparency. We’ll document every verification vendor and their practices on our website, and make it clear in the product who each vendor is. We’ve also set a new requirement: any partner offering facial age estimation must perform it entirely on-device. If they don’t meet that bar, we won’t work with them.
3. A new spoiler channel option. We know many communities use age-restricted channels not for adult content, but for topics people prefer to engage with on their own terms: spoilers, politics, and heavier conversations. We’re building a dedicated spoiler channel option so communities don’t have to age-gate their server just to give members that choice.
4. A technical blog post before global launch. We’ll publish a detailed post explaining how our automatic age determination systems work, including the signal categories and privacy constraints. So you can evaluate our approach for yourselves.
5. Age assurance data in our transparency reports. We’ll include how many users were asked to verify, what methods they used, and how often our automated systems handled it without any user action.

Discord also recently open sourced Osprey, a safety tool that other platforms can now use that you can check out on GitHub and read more in the blog post for that.

The fact is - every platform that's a certain size will end up having to do something like this. As I've said previously - it's not a Discord only problem, it's an issue with the laws being passed like the UK Online Safety Act. Transparency is going to be the key to get it right - we deserve to know exactly who will be scanning us and exactly what they will be doing with the data. If you choose to go through with it that is.