On February 9th of 2026 Discord released a press release titled 'Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally'. It's contents include mandatory age verification for some of the features considered basic like:
Restricting access to speak on stages to only adults.
Restricting access to some basic features like modification of your message request settings.
This is by Discord considered 'mandatory' for Child Protection. If you look past their aggressive scanning of all Images and Messages under the same pretext you can still notice how that is a serious threat to user privacy.
Scenario one: Facial Age estimation fails
Discord has already had this very scenario happen with the introduction of age groups as an attempt at compliance to the United Kingdom's Online safety act. Shortly after this Discord was subject to a data breach of their support portal which involved a sizeable amount of user information from the support portal, including as Discord's Data Breach Disclosure phrased it:
The unauthorized party also gained access to a small number of government‑ID images
- Discord's Data Breach Disclosure
That, of course raises serious privacy concerns considering it involves government issued ID's. Some of which belonged to user's under the age of 18.
Scenario two: message-based age inference
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
- Discord's press release
This approach effectively amounts to mass surveillance. Automatic scanning of messages falls under Articles 8 and 22 of EU's GDPR: Article 8 requires explicit guardian consent for processing a child’s data, while Article 22 restricts automated actions that make decisions about users, including assigning age groups based on message content.
How is that affecting me?
If you're a Discord user that will affect you as the company plans for:
Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord users.
- Discord's press release
Which, for accounts that are created between 2015-2019 is... quite ridiculous to say the least. Other than the already aggressive message and image scanning alongside and being widely known for taking automated moderation actions against user accounts they will also restrict access to some basic features and require you to verify your age to... speak on a Discord stage? (I still fail to notice how)
Solutions?
There is not much you can do other than switch to a different platform; some other platforms have been mentioned in my previous blog post.
You can find the press release to read it for yourself here.