[Tech Thoughts] Discord’s ‘Teen-by-Default’ settings are a mixed bag for users

Discord is a popular voice chat and messaging platform that started off as a gamer’s haven for centralized chatting and voice calls for like-minded groups. With Discord having over 200 million monthly active users as of 2025, it has a critical mass of users it can accidentally anger at a moment’s notice with any untoward changes.

Discord recently promoted a change that did just that, announcing on February 9 that it was implementing a change in March for everyone — as opposed to its original tests in the United Kingdom and Australia — whereby users may need to confirm their age to continue using certain aspects of Discord.

This “teen-by-default” setting is meant to protect new and existing users from encountering age-restricted subsections of Discord servers as well as prevent underaged users from doing certain things that could lead to them being victimized by unscrupulous users.

The restrictions

According to the announcement, “New and existing Discord users globally will be assigned new default settings that support age-appropriate experiences while keeping privacy front and center.”

Here’s what you might see (or not see) on a default experience moving forward.

• Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting.
• Age-assured users are the only ones who can access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.
• Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users.
• People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know.
• Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers. “Stage in” servers are channels on a particular Discord server where specific members can broadcast a message or livestream to everyone on the server at once.

The pushback

Users were generally annoyed by the new restrictions but also because the method by which they could prove themselves to be of legal age might be subject to abuse or security concerns.

When the announcement was first made, users were made to believe everyone had to submit their ID or a selfie video for verification to a third-party group to be deemed an adult.

While Discord has walked back these claims to a degree — a majority of adult users won’t need to go through this process of age verification as Discord will use AI-enabled age prediction “to determine, with high confidence, when a user is an adult” and give them age-appropriate permissions and features — other worries exist.

Ripe for attacks and abuse

One worry is that Discord’s third-party age verifier may get attacked and the data of people taken as a result.

It’s one thing if a selfie of your face is taken, but it’s another thing if you uploaded your driver’s license or social security ID and that information got stolen.

Case in point: Discord in October 2025 announced that one of its third-party vendors got attacked. Discord disclosed it “identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.” Not a good look, for sure.

Discord has said in its most recent announcement on age verification that Discord only receives a user’s age and that facial scans never leave a user’s device, while IDs “are used to get your age only and then deleted,” but with the news from October fresh in the minds of its userbase, the damage is likely done to the reputation of this initiative.

One other point is that Discord’s age verification may already be gamed by coders. Over on the ThreatRoad Substack page, a report mentions the existence of a browser-based age verification bypass tool that simulates a fake 3D avatar that can be moved or adjusted using a game controller.

While your guess is as good as mine whether it will actually work in the future if Discord has anything to say about it, the idea is here is that Discord’s age-verification system didn’t actually take its stakeholders — the 200-million strong userbase — into account.

In the short-term, Discord may be setting up a well-intentioned mixed bag of so-called protections that go nowhere. – Rappler.com