Discord delays its global age verification rollout and cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed verification vendor after upsetting almost everyone on Earth: 'We've made mistakes'

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

After drawing widespread criticism with the announcement of a new global age assurance policy earlier this month, Discord is now delaying the rollout of its age verification changes until the second half of 2026. In a blog post acknowledging that the company had "missed the mark," Discord co-creator and CEO Stanislav Vishnevskiy said it's revising its age verification strategy to address users' privacy concerns by providing greater transparency and offering alternative verification options.

Additionally, Veshnevskiy said Discord has ended its partnership with identity verification vendor Persona, whose financial ties to Palantir founder Peter Thiel intensified the backlash to the company's age assurance policy.

The Discord logo on a phone on top of a dark laptop

(Image credit: Getty Images - NurPhoto / Contributor)

"On top of that, many of you are worried that this is just another big tech company finding new ways to collect your personal data. That we're creating a problem to justify invasive solutions," Veshnevskiy. "I get that skepticism. It's earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry. But that's not what we're doing."

Admitting that "it isn't realistic" to ask users to take Discord at its word, Veshnevskiy said the company is making an effort to provide "more detail about our intentions and how the process works." As a sign of that effort, he said Discord will be publishing a technical blog post about its own automated age determination systems, which he reiterated—as Discord previously had—should mean that "over 90% of users will never need to verify their age to continue using Discord exactly as they do today."

Additionally, Veshnevskiy said Discord is committing to offering "full transparency on vendors" it partners with for age verification processing, "including their data handling practices." Each vendor, he said, undergoes a security and privacy review to prevent a repeat of the 2024 security breach at an ID verification provider that exposed the personal information of up to 70,000 Discord users.

Following its "limited test" with Persona, Veshnevskiy said Discord didn't pursue a further partnership with the vendor as it failed to meet Discord's privacy policies, which requires that age verification vendors ensure that any age estimation takes place entirely on the user's device and doesn't transmit data elsewhere.

Veshnevskiy said that Persona, which researchers recently assessed as being a rat's nest of privacy violations and security vulnerabilities, "did not meet that bar."

While Discord will adhere with age verification requirements where already legally obligated, it's delaying its global age assurance rollout until the second half of 2026 while it pursues the following list of commitments:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

"We've made mistakes. I won't pretend we haven't. And I know that being a bigger company now means our mistakes have bigger consequences and erode trust faster. I don't expect one blog post to fix that," Veshnevskiy said. "Trust is earned through actions over time: shipping the things we promised, owning it when we miss the mark, and giving you real control over your own experience."

Additional transparency is better than the alternative, and Veshnevskiy's messaging here reads as more conscious of user concerns than his company had been at any earlier point in this particular PR saga. But there's an important fact to keep in mind as age verification continues to rear its head: Discord didn't make these commitments until after the outcry.

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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