On Monday, the American messaging app, Discord, said that starting in March, every user of the platform will, by default, have a “teen-appropriate experience.”
The news comes as social media companies face mounting pressure to protect teens from harmful content on the internet.
“As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience by default, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves the privacy and meaningful connections that define Discord,” it said in a blog post announcing the update.
Oluwaseun Bamisile
With this new update, sensitive content will be blurred by default, access to age-gated servers and channels will be blocked, and direct messages from people users don’t know will land in a separate request inbox.
“Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility,” Savannah Badalich, Head of Product Policy at Discord, said in a statement. “We design our products with teen safety principles at the core and will continue working with safety experts, policymakers, and Discord users to support meaningful, long-term wellbeing for teens on the platform.”
Only users who verify that they are adults will be able to turn off these restrictions, speak on stages in servers, or access communities marked as age-restricted.
Discord said it is introducing multiple ways for users to prove their age.
As the company explains, “Discord users can choose to use facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to its vendor partners, with more options coming in the future. Additionally, Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age.”
This isn’t entirely new territory for Discord. The platform has already been testing teen-by-default experiences in the UK and Australia, largely to comply with local online safety laws. It will now roll out the default setting globally.
Of course, age verification almost always raises privacy concerns. The company recently disclosed a security incident that affected about 70,000 users, involving data from a third-party vendor used for age-related appeals.
However, Discord says its new system is designed to be “privacy-forward.” It says that facial age estimation will run on-device, and video selfies will never leave users’ phones or computers. It said identity documents submitted to vendors will be deleted quickly, and no user’s age verification status will be visible to other users.
Ejiro Onose
