Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Sedition It announced on Monday that it would change the default accounts to the teen age grouprequiring some who use the popular calling service to verify their age if they want to access adult-restricted servers, and avoid blocking age-specific content or hosting live streaming events on the platform.
It’s a big step for Discord, which has more than 200 million monthly active users. Discord will start rolling out the changes in early March. Setting teen will not only affect access to some servers, but it will also direct direct message requests to a new inbox, add warnings to friends’ alerts, and blur content filtered as sensitive.
A Discord representative said the company believes most adult users will not have to manually verify their ages, noting that the company’s age inference model uses information such as account duration, device data, and activity to remove manual verification. The representative said that Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process.
Discord is the latest company to add age verification to its platform. During the past year, YouTube, Roblox, ChatGPT Others have added technology to verify or estimate a person’s age to protect younger users from adult content or unwanted contact. Online platforms have come under fire for their impact on children, in some countries Preventing young people from using social media platforms completely.
In the case of Discord, the company said it will offer more than one option for age verification: either provide your ID to a verification partner or use a facial age estimator. For some, this may not be explicitly required.
“Discord will implement its own age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine if an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age,” the company said. “Some users may be required to use multiple methods if more information is needed to set an age group.”
In addition to the service changes, Discord said it will launch a Teen Council, which will consist of about a dozen teens who will help advise the company on “what teens need, how to build meaningful connections, and what makes them feel safe and supported online.” Teenagers aged 13 to 17 years You can apply to the Teen Council Until May 1.
Discord was already requiring people to verify their age to access age-restricted servers. Last year, a third-party vendor was hacked in an incident Which revealed the identities of 70,000 whose ages were verified.
Who’s next for age verification?
While Discord is the latest tech platform to take final action on addressing how it handles the presence of users under the age of 18, it’s unlikely to be the last. Fewer than a dozen states have written laws Require social media companies to verify the age of minorsBut that number may rise as many state governments consider similar legislation.
The pressure to verify doesn’t just come from local and federal rules; It is also a response to lawsuits regarding harm done to children across online platforms and through tools such as chatbots.
You can expect age verification to spread, and for the companies that own these platforms to try to evaluate how to implement guessing or verifying users’ ages, as Discord does.
“Discord’s ‘virtual teen’ approach is an interesting one,” said Rivka Goertz-Little, chief growth officer at Socure, which helps companies handle online identity verification and fraud prevention. “If you cannot prove that you are an adult, be prepared to be protected as a child.”
Companies will have to navigate how to protect children without unnecessarily blocking access to adults, and may become more stringent if more laws on the issue are passed, Little said. This “reflects how important it is for solutions to be smart enough to address a wide range of country-level and international restrictions, which vary in requirements for how age is technically assessed,” Little said.