After more than six months of kicking the age verification can down the road due to community blowback, Discord is finally deploying its new system, albeit with several tweaks it hopes will assuage user frustration.
Discord cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy took to the company blog Tuesday to reveal the final shape of Discord’s age verification plans. The essence of the scheme, as initially revealed in February, is the same: The platform will now use algorithms to identify whether accounts belong to adults or kids. The promises made after users raised a stink, namely that more than 90 percent of users will never have to confirm their ages, are also unchanged.
What’s new in Vishnevskiy’s announcement is primarily the level of technical detail we’re getting about how Discord’s new age verification model works, and several new methods of verifying a user’s age that don’t require handing over an ID scan or providing a selfie to a third party.
One of the primary fears that surfaced among Discord users when the platform first announced it was going to verify user ages was the idea that Discord’s AI would start reviewing user posts and other content to determine their age. Discord took pains to mention that’s not the case in multiple places in Tuesday’s announcement and in related posts, like a technical review of the age verification algorithm.
“Our model looks at patterns of account behavior on Discord,” the company explained. “It does not read, scan, or analyze the content of users’ messages or voice calls.”
There are a number of factors that go into how Discord estimates user age groups without reviewing the content of their interactions on the platform, including account metadata, engagement metrics, community context, device information, and social-graph embeddings.
The most heavily weighted factor, however, is what Discord calls Discord Entity-Relationship Embeddings, or DERE. That, as the company explained in the technical writeup, involves a “Discord social graph” that encodes relationships between users, servers, and the games users claim to play, and represents each user with a 32-dimensional numerical embedding based on their position in that graph.
“DERE is highly predictive of age because users of similar ages tend to form organic social clusters,” Discord explained. “DERE captures this structure without ever being trained on age data.”
More verification options
Using DERE alongside those other factors, Discord’s age-estimation model outputs a probability between 0 and 1 that a user is an adult, but accounts in the middle ground, or those without enough activity for the model to classify confidently, may still have to verify their age to access age-restricted content, spaces, or settings.
Thankfully, verifying one’s age isn’t nearly as intrusive as it used to be thanks to a few more options that Discord has provided.
There’s still the age-verification-service route, which Discord said users could opt into through a service called AgeKey, which allows users to create an age verification passkey that’s stored locally on their own device and can be reused on a variety of supported sites.
Alternatively, Discord can use a credit-card check as an adult-age signal, while Apple and Google can share age ranges already associated with supported accounts or digital IDs. As detailed in a post on age-assurance methods, Discord users can opt for a credit-card check processed through Stripe, which itself isn’t without criticism of its privacy practices.
Alternatively, users of Google Wallet, Google Play, or Apple’s App Store can have those services share an age range with Discord as well. For users already comfortable entrusting Apple or Google with that information, this at least avoids introducing another age-verification provider into the process.
Teen accounts will still get restrictions if they’re identified as such, with messages from non-friends dumped into a request inbox, friend requests being flagged if they come from someone without any mutual friends or servers, and a requirement that users be an adult in order to disable that. Teen accounts will also be blocked from age-restricted servers and channels, and sensitive images will be blurred or blocked as well. Profile data is also locked down.
Vishnevskiy closed out his announcement by admitting that age verification is controversial, but trying to pass the buck on caving to governments demanding web providers add it by saying that the issue is bigger than Discord.
“Any form of age assurance, and the possibility of sharing something biometric or an ID, is a controversial topic,” the Discord cofounder noted. “Rightfully so, because of what it represents and where internet legislation around the world is heading: toward a more gated internet.”
He added that he hopes Discord users will hold the company accountable for its rollout and judge it not just based on what has begun rolling out today.
“We'll get some things wrong, but you can judge us on how we respond: how accurate the age group estimation gets, how fast we fix bad calls, and whether we keep publishing the data so you don't have to take my word for it,” Vishnevskiy said.
Discord age verification is rolling out beginning Wednesday and will reach more accounts as the week progresses. Users who’ve been added to the new system should see their age status, and be able to verify their age if needed, under User Settings > Account Status. ®