Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy announced that the chat service will move the rollout of its age-gating processes back half a year after public protest and journalistic scrutiny on service provider partners. The company Persona will no longer be involved, he says.
This month, Discord announced it would roll the age verification process already implemented in UK, Australia and Brazil out for all users globally in early March. After facing massive public pressure and journalistic scrutiny that revealed connections to Peter Thiel in the service provider considered for the rollout, Discord is now backing off slightly. As Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO at Discord, explains in a blog post, the rollout will be held back until the second back of 2026. Furthermore, Persona, the service provider in question, will no longer be involved in the age verification process, and neither will the service provider through which 70,000 UK ID data sets leaked in October 2025. "We’ve set a new bar for any partner offering facial age estimation, including that it must be performed entirely on-device, meaning your biometric data never leaves your phone. Persona did not meet that bar", he explains.
"The way this landed, many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use Discord. That's not what's happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we're doing and why. That's on us", Vishnevskiy writes. "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. I get that skepticism. It's earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry."
The blog post further states that about Discord expects about 10 per cent of users to be affected by age-gated content. According to Discord’s official numbers of about 250 million users, that would be a massive 25 million users. For them, Discord promises to include several methods of age verification, only one of which will be Face ID. Other methods include automatic age estimation through an AI service, as our interview with Discord explained. Vishnevskiy reiterates that Discord wants to take special care that Face ID documents like face photos will not leave the device they are taken one. Age groups are also supposed to not be visible to other users even on shared servers.
Pascal Wagner
The topic is especially relevant to game developers because so many studios use Discord for community building and keeping in contact with their users. GamesMarkt inquired about the topic at Discord recently. Game screenshots and videos, if they portray violence, sexual content or other content that is deemed adult in certain countries, will not be exempt from being seen as adult content and can make a single channel or full server into an age-restricted area of Discord. Game studios and service providers therefore need to take special note of the coming changes and see if they will affect them for a recent or later game release.
