Age Verification and IPOs: Discord drama
Discord has been a thing of discourse in the few circles I’m for the past while. Mostly over the very pressing issues with regards to the recent general push towards online verification (in which you provide sensitive and potentially biometric data to providers or websites to prove you are who you say you are outside of the very common “give us your birthday so we know you’re not under 13”), and the destruction of the concept of Online Anonymity.
While there had previously been grassroots lobbying about this prior to 2025 that’s pushed through some things, it really took a turn with the recent (as of writing this) “U.K. Age Verification Law” or the Online Safety Act. Passed in October of 2023, it layed out provisions that were later implemented and Rolled out in 2025 which in rather layman’s terms gave the Secretary of State in the United Kingdom “the power to designate, suppress, and record a wide range of online content that they deem illegal or harmful to children” and to generally "regulate" the internet with regards to make things safer, this being seen by those in online circles as more about censorship than tangibly being of real help to Minors on the Internet.
To quote the BBC article ”Online Safety Bill: divisive internet rules become law (2023)”, “The new law puts the onus on firms to protect children from some legal but harmful material, with the regulator, Ofcom, being given extra enforcement powers.”, and it rolled out into effect in July of 2025. This was met with backlash, as well as tech savy minors to develop work arounds for websites that began to mandate and roll out age verification through taking photos of your face (these were being vetted with AI, which is easy to dupe). A lot of other sites still requited to provide sensitive data like driver’s licenses and similar documents to verify a person’s age. The important thing to consider is that rather than putting the onus of offence onto individuals, it puts it on websites that host things. This is a bit of a departure since before this, there was a reasonable threshhold that made it so that websites and app's owners and those involved in running them were not held liable in lieu of holding end-users liable. This is to say that the whole website wouldn't be punished or not punished as severely as individual perpetrators (or at least this is usually the case in the United States that website owners and employees aren't responsible for what users post outside of what they directly post themselves).
There were (and still are) reasonable concerns about privacy with this kind of data, whether or not websites and companies are then selling the data off to data dealers (those who trade in this kind of sensitive information to advert companies) as well as those who may want it for less than savory reasons (Identity theft).
This then further grew as a thing (for lack of a better term, it’s not quite a movement but it’s definitely more distinct than just coincidence) when Australia rolled out the Controversial Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, which bans the use of Social media by those under 16 in Australia.
Both of these are recent (again at time of writing this) examples of Governments pushing more towards Internet Censorship through exerting control on websites as a means to keep children safe from harm, which assumes that people are usually acting in good faith. This is rough since that’s not always the case and those who want to harm kids online are going to find ways around it.
The underlying thing that a lot of people worry about is the fact that this voids online anonymity, which is a bit of a dual edged sword, and encourages more of a digital surveillance state if your real-life identity can be tracked through which websites you frequent. If the Onus is being shifted to the website host rather than the individual, the host would be more inclined to sell out than face consequences. I especially do not feel keen about online inference, which usually defaults to assuming a person is a child rather than an adult. There's also some reasonable concerns about Online speech and Security with regards to laws like this being passed through and implemented throughout 2025
Now what’s all this got to do with Discord?
Discord’s planning to become a publicly traded company, because they’re making quite a bit through Nitro Subscriptions among other means, and going public can make quite a bit of money if done well. It can be argued that some of this is partially due to the fact that running discord as a service at the scale discord is operating at is very costly, but I’m inclined to believe there’s a bit more to it than just getting venture capital to keep bandwith and server costs.
One of the things that they’re rolling out prior to this launch is enforcing age verification through a number of ways (this being providing sensitive documents / information, facial scans, as well as Inference, which assumes your age based on your movements / behaviors on site).
A lot of people aren’t keen on this because Discord’s partially rolled this out already to remain in compliance with UK law, and there was a recent data breach scandal where it turns out they were in fact holding onto the data long term after making statements that they weren’t going to hold onto the data.
There’s also the fact that there’s ties with Palantir with this whole thing, and not a lot of people are keen on that due to issues with Palantir (that as a company turns over data to government bodies that historically has not been used in good faith and has notable ties to ICE).
There has been some damage control done, but this has still burned a lot of bridges with folks that Discord is making a bunch of changes like this while at the same time Filing for an IPO. It makes some sense that if you want to have a successful IPO in this day and age you have to sanitize things, and it is equally rough seeing the net become more and more sanitized to advertiser whims.
Granted this is just an opinion piece really, but it’s kind of like something I wrote somewhere else (which will be mirror’d here) with regards to Photomatt and the state of Wordpress (granted at the time a lot of it was speculation that Photomatt and Automattic’s behavior with regards to suddenly legally harassing and pursuing other companies using the open-source freeware Wordpress to stop doing that in order to consolidate things and drag it to IPO as a separate entity from Automattic, the biggest issue to doing it being that wordpress is open-source and it’s hard to drag something open-source to private use and IPO).
There’s something about going IPO that can just bring the worst out of companies and people and erodes trust from it’s userbase.
There's also something to generally be said about the sanitization of the internet and the sale of human data to get that sweet sweet advertiser money