Stanislav Vishnevskiy, co-founder and CTO of Discord, stated that over 90% of users do not need to verify their age. Starting this week, the platform will categorize accounts into adult, teen, and unverified tiers, using signals such as account age, device and activity, and community membership to make assessments, without reading message content, personal profiles, or demographic attributes.

The adult experience remains unchanged. Teen and unverified accounts can still retain their accounts, servers, friends, private messages, and voice features, but friend requests from strangers will go to a pending list, sensitive images will be blurred or intercepted, access to age-restricted channels will be limited, and some default safety settings cannot be changed. The company noted that the number of communities and interaction methods for typical 15-year-old and 30-year-old users differ at an aggregate level.

After opposition to biometric and ID verification in February, the global rollout was postponed from March to the second half of 2026. At that time, unverified users were defaulted to the teen experience. It has now been piloted in regions with age verification legislation, such as Brazil and Texas, while continuing to comply with mandatory verification under the UK Online Safety Act.

The approximately 10% of users who need verification can choose from device-based facial age estimation, ID, credit cards, age ranges from Apple and Google app stores, Google Wallet, and reusable credentials like AgeKey. The company requires facial age estimation to be completed on the device, ensuring biometric data does not leave the phone, having previously abandoned the supplier Persona for not meeting standards and switching to Incode. Users who do not verify will lose access to age-restricted content and the ability to modify certain safety settings, while retaining other functionalities.

Those buying are looking to write enforceable legislation and app store policies to protect minors, while those selling are using behavioral signals to replace universal ID verification on the platform. Funding has shifted from verification suppliers to in-house security models. Beneficiaries are users who do not access restricted content and have sufficiently long account histories, while those under pressure are new accounts wanting to access restricted channels but refusing to provide ID, as well as adult users defaulted to the teen tier.

Technical blog posts will simultaneously disclose the logic behind the age estimation model. The rollout will gradually cover all users within a week.

Source: Public Information