In a lengthy blog post from its CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord announced it will delay and refine changes to the way the company handles content and communications for younger users, including adding age verification features.
Earlier this month, the real-time chat and message board service announced it was going to default all user accounts to a Teen setting. This would restrict access to adult-oriented servers and limit some content and communications for accounts that weren't already auto-detected as adult or manually age-verified by Discord users.
Vishnevskiy acknowledged that the company's plan was not communicated clearly, leading to significant backlash. Many people, he said, believed everyone would be required to scan their faces and upload their government IDs to be age-verified.
"That's not what's happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we're doing and why," Vishnevskiy said. "That's on us ... We've made mistakes."
The changes, which will still include age-verification options, will now roll out globally in "the second half of 2026," according to the post.
The backlash to Discord's planned changes led some people on social media to post that they were canceling their subscriptions to Nitro, Discord's paid add-on service, or leaving the service entirely in search of an alternative.
Two Discord controversies
Vishnevskiy also addressed two controversial aspects of the changes: Discord's plan to use Persona as an age-verification service, and the announcement of the changes only a few months after a data breach involving user data.
Vishnevskiy said Discord will no longer partner with Persona, a company that works with Reddit and Roblox and has been accused of surveillance of user data. Persona has denied it has ties to federal agencies and says it does not sell or share personal data.
"In January, we ran a limited test with Persona in the UK only," Vishnevskiy said. "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."
Vishnevskiy said that Discord is refining how it estimates users' ages, for which it uses factors such as how long someone has been on the platform. The "new bar" the company is setting for age estimation is to perform all aspects of age verification on the same device, so that a user's biometric data never leaves their phone.
Regarding the security incident, Discord said it has cut ties with the vendor involved, 5CA, and will be more transparent with customers going forward.
"To be clear, we do not use that vendor for age assurance," Vishnevskiy said. "In fact, we no longer work with them at all, and we've taken the lessons from that incident seriously."
