It's DiscordOver - 10/02/2026 Blog Entry

Yesterday was a rough day for the internet. If you didn't get the memo, Discord will enforce age verification on everyone, starting in early March. I really encourage you to read the news before you form any opinions.
You might point and laugh at me, thinking stuff like "He is such a terminally online weirdo", but hear me out. This change can be a chain of dominoes with the potential to gravely damage our most basic freedoms.

Protection or Control?

I don't think anyone that didn't visit certain island resort wants children to suffer online. What Discord supposedly wants to do is noble, but the strategy used for protecting the children fails to protect anyone, if anything it creates many hidden dangers for everyone involved.

First, the children that Discord wants to protect usually have unrestricted, unsupervised access to the internet. They are smart and addicted, so they will go to surprising lengths to keep their access to the internet. What stops them from lying about their age or stealing someone's identity if they get one of the controls triggered on their account?
Now, they are kids; if anyone gets in trouble for this while they are minors, it will be their irresponsible parents. But what happens to the adults?

As an adult, your actions can trigger legal consequences that can get you in very real trouble. Let's say you don't want to give Discord your ID or face because you value your privacy, so you resort to the same tricks as the kids and you upload someone else's face or ID. Big mistake.
That is the same kind of crime as submitting a fake passport at an airport or impersonating someone. All it takes is for Discord and your local government to decide that skipping the age verification is like submitting a fake document at an airport. For example, this could be dangerous for people that are politically persecuted by powerful governments.
The best course of action is to either refuse or accept, no tricks. Give them your ID or stop using those Discord features. You never know how the world might change in a few years; avoid risks.

Leaky Pipes

Another problem that this rollout has is the absolutely atrocious handling of the user's verification data. For their trial in late 2025, they hired a third party to manage the verification, and they failed to do basic things like deleting user data after verification or having robust systems to prevent people from hacking in.
Discord will probably just replicate the same strategy for handling the data in the global rollout. It's a matter of time until Discord hires irresponsible people and they get hacked, leaking millions of valid IDs into the internet.

Bad actors will be able to impersonate innocent people and do extremely dangerous things like opening bank accounts in their name or other kinds of fraud. They could also use AI filters that change their face to do fake interviews and get away with even bigger crimes.

It doesn't matter if they promise to be more responsible. Is the risk of fraud on a massive scale worth it for protecting bratty children?

AI Control

If you look closely at the announcement Discord made, this part will probably catch your attention:

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.

You know what that means: AI scanning. Due to Discord's proprietary nature, we have no idea how this AI will be used; it can do a lot more things, like scraping every chat inside Discord in order to sell the data to the hungry AI monoliths without user consent or for training their own AI. This wording leaves the door open for automatically scanning EVERY user, regardless of what they decided to do with age verification.
Now, does it stop at text, or will it scan audiovisual content too? What stops Discord from scanning an artist's material in order to steal, sorry, I mean legally and lawfully train a humble AI model? Could it be used for censorship? What happens if, for example, the Indian government uses it to ban any sympathizers with Pakistan or vice versa?

Conclusion

Please, don't take this lightly. If you agree with me, make as much noise as possible. Discord has to either do this right or reverse this whole idea completely. This took me by surprise, and the time limit until this triggers is pretty short, only a month.
If you want to take this a step further, stop using Discord completely and delete your account. The unfortunate thing is that the alternatives are lacking in many features people like, for example, custom emojis. Among the options that replicate Discord's interface, the best one is Matrix. It is open source, and it prioritizes user security and decentralization more. Give it a try; I will check it out soon.

This will be a month for reflection. I have friends on Discord, and I am not sure what will happen to those friendships. Some are waiting to see how this is implemented; others will leave as soon as it hits. Many are completely ignorant about the nasty side of Discord's actions, or maybe they just became completely numb with the constant flurry of dystopia lately.

I mean, look at my timing. Just when I decide to create a server to hang out, the next month this happens... Now what? Migration?

It seems like we can't have nice things... Use more indie social media, make a website, cherish your forums and image boards (check the sidebar buttons for some cool ones!), and avoid doom scrolling. Most importantly, defend your freedom and have fun.