In summary:
- Discord admits mistakes in its age verification approach and is postponing the rollout until the second half of 2026 after user backlash.
- PCWorld reports that Discord is cutting ties with controversial partner Persona and promises over 90% of users won’t need verification.
- The company plans to introduce more verification options and transparency reports while emphasizing a privacy-focused approach moving forward.
The storm of criticism against Discord’s decision to start requiring “age verification” seems to be putting the company in a sweat—enough to change course, at least temporarily.
For starters, Discord recently announced that it is cutting ties and distancing itself from Persona, the controversial age verification partner service that caught a lot of flak from users over its privacy policies and handling of facial and ID data. Discord is now evaluating several other suppliers and emphasizing privacy as a top priority.
Discord’s original plan was to begin age verification as early as March, but in light of the controversy, the company is now postponing the rollout of age verification to the second half of 2026, per a blog post that tells users how they misunderstood the point, that age verification is actually a good thing despite all the privacy concerns.
In that blog post, Discord co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy writes that “over 90% of users will never need to verify their age to continue using Discord exactly as they do today.” Later on, he also explains: “If you’re among the less than 10% of users who do need to verify, we’ll give you options, designed to tell us only your age and never your identity.”
Discord really wants you to believe that the company won’t collect your personal information: “We don’t want to know who you are. We just need to know whether you’re an adult. And it works both ways: a vendor has no way to associate your identity back to your Discord account either. That’s by design.” (A vendor is a third-party middleman that handles the age verification process between you and Discord.)
While delaying the rollout of age verification, Discord will be working to add more verification options, better vendor transparency, as well as transparency reports that include “how many users were asked to verify, what methods they used, and how often our automated systems handled it without any user action.”
“We’ve made mistakes,” the blog post concludes. “We’re listening. We’ll get this right.” Only time will tell how true that is.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication M3 and was translated and localized from Swedish.