Discord is rolling out facial scanning and ID checks in March for everyone who doesn't want to be locked into a 'teen-appropriate experience'

"Eugh," we said, back in 2025 when Discord began "an experiment" in which some users were asked to scan their faces or IDs in order to verify that they were old enough to access sensitive content. But experiments, generally speaking, are tests, and tests, generally speaking, are something you do in pursuit of a particular goal, and now here we are not quite a year later and Discord is preparing to roll out face scanning and ID checks for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

You'll still be able to use Discord if you opt not to participate in this particular surveillance nightmare, but beginning in early March you'll be locked into a "teen-appropriate experience" if you don't. That means content filters, age gates, the inability to speak in "stage channels"—essentially channels that enable a group of people to converse while an audience listens—and restrictions on direct message and friend requests.

"Nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users, which is why we are announcing these updates in time for Safer Internet Day," Discord head of product policy Savannah Badalich said. "Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord's existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility."

Discord says its facial-scanning system will deliver "privacy-forward age assurance": Your facial scan won't be used to identify you as an individual, but will instead use it (in conjunction with the power of AI, I assume) to determine whether or not you're actually an adult. If you prefer, or if perhaps you need to appeal an incorrect age guess, you can upload a government ID instead.

"Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user's device," today's announcement says, adding,"Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly—in most cases, immediately after age confirmation."

You may recall it was one of those vendor partners who leaked an estimated 70,000 age verification photos in October 2025—just four months ago—along with names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses: "A pretty comprehensive mess," as PC Gamer's Jeremy Laird put it at the time.

So that's pretty awful, and there's no reason to assume it won't happen again. The even bigger issue, though, is the growing embrace of the digital panopticon. The UK's Online Safety Bill is "a massive threat to online privacy, security, and speech," the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in 2023 ahead of its passage as the Online Safety Act: "Instead of security, we will have backdoors in end-to-end encryption. And instead of free speech, we will have scanning and filtering of all content, all the time."

Despite significant public pushback, other countries and regions are following suit with their own regime of age checks and definitions of "sensitive" content, which in some cases has led to bans and blocks: Australians under 16 are banned from social media, for instance—although not from Steam, illustrating the fundamentally arbitrary nature of the whole thing. In the US, the Kids Online Safety Act will lead platforms to over-censor, the EFF warned in 2025, because "the list of harms in KOSA’s 'duty of care' provision is so broad and vague that no platform will know what to do regarding any given piece of content."

What these new laws are likely to do is drive people to find ways around them, as we famously saw when people figured out that Death Stranding's photo mode could be used to bypass Discord's "robust" age verification system in 2025, or simply to find other, less regulated ways to interact online: A 2025 report found that the UK's age verification requirement was driving down traffic to sites that complied, while those who did not were enjoying an uptick. Badalich told The Verge that Discord expects "some sort of hit" to its traffic as a result of the new face scanning system, but said, "We'll find other ways to bring users back."