> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally,

Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.

This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.

I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.

I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.

You're downplaying it in the same way that others are overplaying it.

- There are servers that are labelled adult only because it's simpler to label _everything_ as causing cancer than it is to only label the correct things. I can't join channels for some games because they're "adult"; even though they're not

- There are servers that are getting rid of content because they don't want some automatic system to label them as adult, even though they're not. There's a game server that got rid of it's meme channel, because people could (but don't) post content that some system might see as adult.

So it is a bigger deal than you're making it out to be. It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.

>I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord.

until it becomes law, like it is (or in the process of becoming) ~everywhere.

Maybe! But laws like California’s new law and the Texas law both are making it mandatory from a legal compliance point of view.

The direction of these restrictions is not “optional”

You know that none of those things actually protect children from predators which is the supposed reason for these changes. So when they inevitably don't work Discord will take the next step of requiring age verification from everyone.

Why, oh why, would you give them the long term benefit of the doubt for literally no gain to you whatsoever?

You are totally downplaying it in an effort to not see what others are talking about.

> Discord’s age verification is optional

...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?

Additionally Discord may verify your age based on the collected data without consent.

Pretty sure in some EU countries it is mandatory now, iirc