Discord Delays Controversial Age-Verification Rollout After Backlash: ‘We’ve Made Mistakes’

Discord hears you. It gets your concerns. It wants to win back your trust. That’s the message from cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy who announced the company’s controversial new age-verification requirements will be delayed, but not reversed, as it works to try to better explain what’s happening to its millions of users. “We’ve made mistakes,” Vishnevskiy wrote.

Here’s what’s changing according to a new blog post on Discord’s website.

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. Where we have legal obligations, we will continue to meet them, but we will only expand globally after we’ve done the following:

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.

The apologetic backpaddling comes after weeks of Discord users pushing back on new requirements that would require some users to submit photos and IDs to the gaming chat platform if its AI tools decide you’re not over the age of 18 and you try to access “adult” content servers. A prior “experiment” with this new policy that was implemented in the UK became a lightning rod for some frustrated users when it was revealed that one of the vendors, a firm called Persona, involved n the process was backed by funds from surveillance company Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel.

Discord later said it cut ties with the vendor and that it has new safeguards in place to prevent user data from being hacked as it accidentally was last fall.

This is a developing story.