Discordians now subject to whims of new age verification technology
Discord users asked to prove they’re adults get less intrusive options
Discord is set to implement age verification technology on its platform, after months of delays due to community backlash. The new system, unveiled by Discord cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, will use algorithms to determine whether accounts belong to adults or children. The primary goal is to prevent more than 90 percent of users from ever needing to confirm their ages.
Unlike previous methods, Discord's new approach will not require users to submit ID scans or provide selfies to third parties. Instead, the company will rely on various factors such as account metadata, engagement metrics, and social-graph embeddings to estimate user age groups. One of the main factors in this estimation is "Discord Entity-Relationship Embeddings" (DERE), a 32-dimensional numerical representation of users based on their position in a social graph.
Despite the new methods, users may still need to verify their age through options like AgeKey, credit-card checks, or age ranges from Apple and Google. Teen accounts will face restrictions on messaging non-friends, accepting friend requests, and disabling age-restricted servers. These changes aim to balance user privacy with regulatory requirements.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
