Announced on 9 February, Discord has confirmed all users will need to verify their age with a face scan or by uploading a form of ID as part of its new safety measures.
This is already the case in the UK and Australia to comply with online safety laws, but age checks will now be rolled out worldwide.
Its new safety measures will place everyone into a teen-appropriate experience "by default". You will need to upload a photo of their ID to confirm your age or take a video selfie, where AI will be used to estimate your facial age. This means you’ll need to prove your age and access age-restricted communities and unblur material marked as sensitive.
Discord policy head Savannah Badalich says "Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord's existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility."
What This Means for Your Online Safety
In October 2025, official ID photos uploaded to Discord were potentially leaked after a firm which helped the platform verify ages was hacked, calling into question the truth behind Discord’s claim that face scans would not be collected, and ID uploads would be deleted after the verification is complete.
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Speaking with the BBC, Drew Benvie, head of social media consultancy Battenhall.
said: "The sentiment behind creating a safer community for all social media users is a positive move", but the new system could be "fraught with issues".
"Discord could lose users if its implementation of age verification backfires, but it could equally attract more new users who will be drawn to its new standards for online safety by design," he said.
Despite clarifying it will use "inference" tools such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities to identify users likely to be adults, users are still outraged.
Enter Teamspeak, the OG Voice Chat for Gamers
What a blast from the past, right!
I remember my friends were using TeamSpeak back in high school, back in 2012. Yeesh.It looks a little different now though, with a Discord-style UI update.
TeamSpeak has been around for decades though - it all started in 1999 as a personal project for a group of friends who met each other playing an online game, who wanted to address communication gaps in online gaming. It’s fair to say TeamSpeak laid the groundwork for the gaming industry we know today.
The issue was, in TeamSpeak 3, every voice channel included a built-in text chat, allowing for communication exclusively among users currently in that channel. You also had to pay for a TeamSpeak server. Hosting servers isn’t cheap. As Discord introduced free voice chat, open to all text channels and interactive elements, the demise of Teamspeak was inevitable.
In fact, my high school friends migrated over to Discord back in 2017. But these Discord ID changes might be enough for me to suggest moving back. Even TeamSpeak would welcome it.
What Discord Alternatives Are There?
Gamers over on r/pcmasterrace seem to share my thoughts. User Liarus_ says: “Discord is full of cosmetic BS and is ensh*ttifying itself very very fast, seeing this global face scanning thing is just the drop that's pushing me away from it”
I would really recommend returning to TeamSpeak if you’re looking for high-latency, high-quality voice chat for online gaming.
Another user posted on Reddit: “TeamSpeak really need to jump on the opportunity and start by removing the price tag for their mobile app.”
In January 2025, TeamSpeak announced the Beta Release of the TeamSpeak 6 Server. With Discord users looking to hop, this could be the chance TeamSpeak has been waiting for for two decades.
There's also Signal, Rocket Chat or Zulip, though I can't speak to their effectiveness having never used them myself.
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