To comply with new legal requirements, Discord currently requires age verification for its users in the United Kingdom and Australia to access adult content. Beginning with a phased roll-out starting in March, its expanding age verification(nueva ventana) requirements to all 200+ million or so users worldwide with new “teen-by-default settings”.
This means all Discord users will have a teen-appropriate experience by default, unless Discord determines (or the user can prove) they are at least 18 years old.
What are the default settings?
Unless verified as an adult:
- You won’t be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.
- Mature content will be blurred out.
- By default, you won’t be able to receive direct messages (DMs) from people you may not know. (This setting can be changed by a verified adult.)
- Friend requests from people you may not know will come with a warning.
- You won’t be able to speak on Stage(nueva ventana) (streaming) channels.
Although Discord now hosts a large number of online communities, some of which have very NSFW interests, it is still primarily an online space for discussing games. This means the new rules will have little effect on many of its adult users, who may feel little need to verify their age to bypass these restrictions.
How will Discord’s age verification work?
Discord is keen to point out that most adult users probably won’t need to do anything to verify their age. Its new inference model will analyze certain data, including how long you’ve been a Discord user, the times of day you use Discord, which games you play, and other behavioral signals to determine if there is a high likelihood that you’re over 18. Private messages will not be included in this analysis, according to Discord.
If the inference model isn’t convinced that you’re an adult, you’ll be asked to provide one or more additional proofs.
Video selfie
Using AI, Discord can make an age estimation based on a video selfie that you record. This selfie never leaves your device, and Discord says that no biometric scanning or facial recognition is performed, only age estimation.
Government‑issued ID upload
You may be asked to upload a government-issued photo identity document, which will be human-verified by a third party vendor. This is likely to be the most controversial part of Discord’s new global age verification policy, as it was this very process that led to a high-profile 2025 data breach resulting in the theft of some 70,000 ID images.
Claiming to have learned from the breach, Discord says that:
- It has partnered with a new third-party provider (K-ID) to perform ID checks.
- ID images sent to K-ID will be “deleted quickly”.
However, other than changing the provider, this process is not substantially different from the one that was compromised in 2025. It should also be noted the third-party customer support service Discord alleged was responsible for the breach vigorously denied(nueva ventana) that it had ever handled government-issued IDs for Discord, or that its system had been hacked.
Whichever method is used, your age verification status will remain private and is not visible to other Discord users.
Final thoughts on Discord’s new age verification system
Discord’s move toward global age verification reflects a broader trend across the internet. Increasingly under pressure from regulators, platforms are keen to prove that minors are protected and that adult content is securely hidden behind meaningful age verification checks.
For many Discord users, especially those who use the platform mainly for gaming or general communities, the new teen-by-default settings will likely have little or no impact, and they may never need to verify their age at all.
And for most adults who do wish to access NSFW content, the automated inference model and on-device age estimation solutions appear to provide privacy-friendly age-verification solutions. Although as Discord apps are closed source, there’s no way to be sure what they’re really doing.
And if there’s one thing that the almost daily drumbeat of huge data breaches has taught us, it’s that if data can be breached, its only a matter of time until it is.
