Discord Didn’t Learn A Thing.
On February 16th of this year, I wrote a blog post about Discord and its then-forthcoming age verification program it was preparing to roll out the following months. You can read that here. Thanks to quite the massive backlash around that time, that got pushed back. Searches for Discord alternatives spiked, and I’m sure they lost a fair number of users as a result. I myself still have my account for the moment, but began encouraging those I chatted with there to come add me on Signal. They may have triaged that user loss with that decision, and decided to push it back till later in the year. By later, I mean it’s in effect right now.
Now they would tell you it was for re-examination of the policy. But what it really was about is they hoped you’d forget about it, in my view. They likely hoped that pushing it back to September may see it get lost in the news cycle when every day in our current news cycle feels like two months of events have taken place. Unfortunately for the braintrust at Discord (no offense to actual braintrusts), that strategy failed and the tech news sites were right on top of it, including one of my favorite sites like Ars Technica.
After all this glorious time supposedly spent re-evaluating this initiative, they say 90% of people won’t even have to do anything to keep their accounts from being locked now. (They’re still going to roll it out, of course.) I like that they feel that’s a thing people will feel better about. It’s the first thing they tend to say when interviewed, because they like to deflect. The fact is those people will still have to supply Discord with a government ID or a facial scan, both of which they swear up one side and down the other that they are never going to see themselves. You can decide if you want to believe a company that has, as recently as October of 2025, suffered a massive data breach should be entitled to ANY of your personally identifiable information. To me, that says you can’t be trusted because you didn’t even take the appropriate safeguards with the information you already had.
Of course, the age old reason companies like Discord are doing this is supposedly for the protection of children. It’s why some governments have done similar to porn sites, because we have to protect children. Do I think kids should be protected? Absolutely.
Do I think it’s the job of tech companies or any other company to do it? Absolutely not.
It is a parent’s job to protect their children. Full stop. When a parent abdicates to tech companies or anyone else, they are giving away part of their own job as the caretaker and nurturer of a child. Companies like Discord and others are not the parents of the children of the world. It should no more be their job than it is to make sure your kids eat the right foods and get proper medical care. That is a parent’s job. If that means parents have to be more vigilant on tech, so be it. If your child plays Roblox and you don’t know what that is, guess what needs to be on your to-do list quickly? If you don’t choose to do that, that is a failure on your part to be more present in each aspect of a child’s life. If your kid uses Discord but you aren’t familiar with it, looking into that just became part of the job of being a parent for you.
But that’s a whole other blog post where I could probably do a ten part series. This age verification nonsense with Discord is less about protecting children as it is about spying on the population. That’s what it is at its heart. When I read the co-founder of the platform talking about how important privacy is, I sprain my eyes from all the rolling they do. Discord was tied to Peter Thiel as early as this past spring before deciding to sever ties with Persona, which is his age verification software. He’s the guy that doesn’t think democracy and freedom should be tied to one another. He’s someone whose name appears over 2,000 times in the Epstein files as well, though with no allegations of wrongdoing. He’s also invested in Flock through the Founders Fund, the company with cameras installed around the country to take pictures of you as you drive or do much anything outside of your house. To think either is worried about kids is laughable at best, in my view. They want to know what people are doing, they want to monitor you. The protection of children is just the buzz phrase that they use to justify it because the real reason would rightly anger many people.
So you may ask now. Mark, what can we do about it? That’s a good question. The first thing you can do on Discord is stop giving them money. I have no paid subscriptions with them, and will never have one. That’s the only way to show a company you mean what you say. It’s the only metric that makes a company change course: stop giving them access to your cash. You can seek out alternatives that you may find more respectful of your privacy. I mentioned Signal, and I have it on all my devices. But there are others.
The fact is that no one is going to protect your privacy more than you. Corporations are money-driven machines that seek out maximum profits above any and every other priority. None of them are innocent. Some are better than others about it, but at the end of the day, that is the cold hard fact. They aren’t your friends. They aren’t your children’s babysitters. You only matter to them based on if you give or make them money and how much.
I encourage you to advocate for yourself and your kids. Don’t give away your personal information to these companies unless you’re satisfied with how they are going to use it. And if they change course like Discord did under the guise of protecting kids, then that becomes a new decision point for you as to whether or not you want to continue supporting them through using the platform and especially if you are giving them money for anything. That’s how you change just about anything in this world from business practices to politicians.
You have the power to make right the changes you want to see through your time and money. Don’t give it away, because that’s the strongest weapon we have.
~
If you appreciate this blog, I’d be honored to have you help support it. I have a strong voice in the tech space, and this whole space doesn't tend to like that. If you do, then I’d be honored for you to help me keep sharing my thoughts. You can click here.
