People need to realize that this isn't JUST a Discord issue. This is a policy issue AS WELL. Fucking pay attention to the politics around you. And this isn't just a United States issue as well.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
95 points (90.6% liked)
Technology
81026 readers
4785 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
this is true.. its not just Discord.. politics are pushing hard on tech.. like Facebook, Google, well everything basically.. They want to push age verification everywhere.
Its really dangerous, and I will never comply (even though I have nothing to hide). I already deleted my discord. I will not join back anymore. Its too late already.
Each chat, social network or anything that is trying to implement this -> ACCOUNT DELETED.
What I'm saying isn't that you should or shouldn't delete social media accounts. What I'm saying is that eventually they're all going to HAVE to do it to be able to operate within certain countries. The account deletion/boycott/etc isn't enough, you have to go after the political leaders that are FORCING companies into these deals cause governments are GOING to continue to go after companies to force the whole of the internet into surveilling users. Policy and laws need to be changed. The work HAS to be done.
You must never comply ESPECIALLY if you have nothing to hide. They are treating innocent people like terrorists and criminals and this is not acceptable.
I pray that the impetus from all this results in overturning all of the (allegedly) anti-terrorist legislation made post 9/11 (post 2000 in some cases).
ahem... politics is NOT pushing on tech..
tech is pushing and telling politics what to do. tech controls politics now
This is the way.
I’m just going to repeat myself for the hundredth time here. This is exactly what happens when you define words in such broad terms. Social media does not include things like discord. It doesn’t include Reddit, it doesn’t include Lemmy. But because so many damn people just refer to any site that they can talk with other people on as social media, it became enshrined in law and now literally every service you touch is legally defined as social media.
This is not hyperbole; with the current definitions across numerous countries, Amazon (the place where you buy things, not other services like games) is legally defined as social media.
Words mean things and when words are hijacked for other purposes it allows governments to strip away your rights without you realizing.
Words don't have meanings. Meanings have words.
Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.
Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?
I vote for this guy for president.
I grew up with certain words meaning certain things. Then I get older, and suddenly, those words are gone, new words exist, old words mean new things, medical terms are now no longer medical terms and just purely an insult derived from a definition that didn't used to define the root word. Pluto isn't a planet. Instead of 9 planets, there are now an unknown number at least in the thousands. There's like 4 other Earths.
Language shouldn't change over time. It can adapt, but I should know that grass is green. Not grass is plubertatude. A word I just made up for the demonstration of absurdity. Nothing wrong with grass being green.
medical terms are now no longer medical terms and just purely an insult
Language drifts over time, that's normal, always has been. Stay on target soldier. FORMAL language however needs very strict definitions or it just stops working. Words mean things is true. That still doesn't mean you get to say the "R" word.
They didn't walk back shit, they upped the stakes by saying they use your chats to analyse your age. That's just as bad.
They were already doing that.
Every advertising company already monitors you whenever possible to determine things like your age to target ads as effectively as possible. If a isn't relying on a third party for advertising like Google AdSense, and they're handling it internally, they definitely know that info.
That's why I am deleting my shit and going to delete my account.
This is misleading. Discord is not reversing course. It was in their original announcement that they would try to automatically determine everyone’s age and “most” people won’t need to do any sort of verification. A lot of people and journalists didn’t read that far apparently.
Yes, they aren't changing course, but Discord certainly did not say "most" in the announcement and it was a single sentence in a long article about age verification and content gating. They should have been far more upfront about their inference method being the primary one in the first place. This was a communication issue and not a reader issue.
It's also possible they decided to tune their inference model to be a lot more, let's say, permissive so that there isn't a huge backlash of people getting asked to provide ID when they've been using the service for nearly a decade or longer.
"For most users" the whole point here is to gradually get people used to having to show their papers to access the internet. We must accept nothing less than a total reversal here. Give them an inch each day and eventually they'll have their mile.
- They're instead scanning your data using AI... Not exactly an improvement.
- Shitty AI article.
So they're going to scan everything you do with AI to figure out how old you are instead. Not really better.
they have already done this for at least the last year or so easily. I noticed it when I requested by data package last year, theres a clear area on it that infers both your gender and your age in it.
They are just acting like this is a "new system" but in reality its a system that have had for awhile now, just didn't have any public facing usage of it.
For anyone else that wants to see it themselves, and they have a discord takeout. its located at the very bottom at the events file in activity/analytics.
the end of the file shows json objects that indicate what your predicted age and gender is.
Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn't that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially "grandfathered in", but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?
They already do this for advertising. And it is extremely accurate.
“Platform will use AI-powered age prediction based on existing user data instead of universal biometric verification”
So is this supposed to make us feel better?
That is even creepier and more stupid. This is why I am deleting my shit and going to move onto a different platform.
Yep to late deleted all my servers and Discord yesterday so no going back.
Sorry but I’m not clicking a link ending in .ai
I’ll wait for another source.
What do you have against the British overseas territory of Anguilla? Ultra-specific geographical prejudice.
Archive link for the article: https://archive.ph/JN2sD
I’m good bro.
You would rather read an ad filled article than read the Archive version of it...?
I rather not read it at all if it comprises my security.
TOO LATE... I deleted my account. fk them.
Keep looking for alternatives.