Discordians now subject to whims of new age verification technology

After more than six months of kicking the age verification can down the road due to community blowback, Discord is finally deploying its new system, albeit with several tweaks it hopes will assuage user frustration.

Discord cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy took to the company blog Tuesday to reveal the final shape of Discord’s age verification plans.

The essence of the scheme, as initially revealed in February, is the same: The platform will now use algorithms to identify whether accounts belong to adults or kids.

The promises made after users raised a stink, namely that more than 90 percent of users will never have to confirm their ages, are also unchanged.

What’s new in Vishnevskiy’s announcement is primarily the level of technical detail we’re getting about how Discord’s new age verification model works, and several new methods of verifying a user’s age that don’t require handing over an ID scan or providing a selfie to a third party.

One of the primary fears that surfaced among Discord users when the platform first announced it was going to verify user ages was the idea that Discord’s AI would start reviewing user posts and other content to determine their age.

Discord took pains to mention that’s not the case in multiple places in Tuesday’s announcement and in related posts, like a technical review of the age verification algorithm.

“Our model looks at patterns of account behavior on Discord,” the company explained.

“It does not read, scan, or analyze the content of users’ messages or voice calls.” There are a number of factors that go into how Discord estimates user age groups without reviewing the content of their interactions on the platform, including account metadata, engagement metrics, community context, device information, and social-graph embeddings.

The most heavily weighted factor, however, is what Discord calls Discord Entity-Relationship Embeddings, or DERE.

That, as the company explained in the technical writeup, involves a “Discord social graph” that encodes relationships between users, servers, and the games users claim to play, and represents each user with a 32-dimensional numerical embedding based on their position in that graph.

“DERE is highly predictive of age because users of similar ages tend to form organic social clusters,” Discord explained.

“DERE captures this structure without ever being trained on age data.” More verification options Using DERE alongside those other factors, Discord’s age-estimation model outputs a probability between 0 and 1 that a user is an adult, but accounts in the middle ground, or those without enough activity for the model to classify confidently, may still have to verify their age to access age-restricted content, spaces, or settings.