Last week, Discord invited the contempt of its users by announcing it will be rolling out global age verification restrictions in March, which will restrict viewable content and communities for users who don't scan either their faces or government IDs and haven't already been determined to be an adult by unspecified prediction algorithms. Approximately nobody thought this was cool.
Impossibly, despite its attempts to pacify the ensuing outcry by issuing a clarification that merely some users will be required to submit to its child detection matrix, Discord has managed to make the rollout of its global age assurance policy seem even grimier. The company has informed some users in the UK they may be part of "an experiment" with Persona, an age verification vendor whose investors include Peter Thiel, co-founder of ICE's premier surveillance provider, Palantir.
In the days since Discord's age assurance policy announcement, reports began bubbling up on social media from users in the UK—where Discord already requires age verification as a result of its 2025 Online Safety Act—who were presented with prompts to consent to age verification processed by the company Persona.
Sure enough, Discord's support article describing its age verification process now features a disclaimer informing UK users that they "may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona." And while Discord had previously insisted that facial age verification recordings would only be stored and processed locally, the notice about Persona says that "the information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted."
While some users have speculated that Discord is testing alternate age verification providers because k-ID—its primary age authentication partner—has proven susceptible to creative workarounds, Discord doesn't specify why some users will be processed by Persona instead.
Regardless of the reasoning, the partnership with Persona has compounded concerns about privacy due to the company's investors. In its two most recent rounds of venture capital funding, its lead investor has been Founders Fund—the venture fund co-founded and directed by Peter Thiel.
A co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, Thiel is nowadays more often discussed—or reviled—for his work in co-founding Palantir, the data harvesting and surveillance technology firm that furnishes ICE's deportation efforts with a digital panopticon and compiles databases from the private information of American citizens.
And listen, I know people harp on this a lot, but it's a company literally named after an orb that lets the most evil force in the world spy on your thoughts.
If that's not enough for you to be unsettled by Thiel's money being involved in Discord's age verification rollout, the billionaire—who infamously wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" in 2009—appeared more than 2,200 times in the latest release of the Epstein files, where he coordinated years of meetings with the convicted child predator and sex trafficker.
Discord has downplayed the significance of its age verification rules in response to public fears, while critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rindala Alajaji, argue that the outcry is warranted for myriad reasons. A figure like Thiel appearing on the scene within days sure as hell doesn't dispel those fears. IRC's looking more attractive every day.