The Dystopian Shift in Discord's ID Verification

This is how Discord Dies…

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Estimated reading time: 28 minutes for the text on this page.

Summary

The video unfolds how Discord has escalated its ID verification process, compelling users to go through AI face scans or provide ID to access certain parts. Initially seen as a beneficial idea to control underage users, the feature has burgeoned into a dystopian requirement. Governments like those of the UK and Australia are enforcing strict policies, while Discord faces pressure with lawsuits and massive fines. The video critiques the invasiveness of these policies and highlights the inefficacy of privacy-invasive measures in truly safeguarding users, alongside the growing governmental interference in online spaces.

Highlights

Discord's new ID verification measures started with good intent but turned dystopian. 🤔
Users are forced to scan their face via AI or provide an ID to access certain content. 🆔
The measures are only currently active in the UK and Australia due to governmental pressure. 🌐
This policy led to an $18 million fine threat from governments and ongoing lawsuits. 💸
VPNs have become tools for bypassing these new restrictions, illustrating the workaround culture. 🌍
The Australian government is using Discord as a test case for its new age verification policies. 🎚️
Privacy concerns rise as third-party companies are involved in face scanning processes. 🕵️‍♀️
Critical views suggest the policy does not solve issues but instead invades user privacy. 🚫

Key Takeaways

Discord has introduced AI face scanning to verify users' age, initially to manage underage access. 🕵️‍♂️
This feature feels dystopian and invasive as it expands beyond its original purpose. 🤖
Governments in the UK and Australia are pushing Discord to enforce stringent measures under threat of fines. 💼
The necessity for users to verify their age for accessing content has led to workarounds like VPNs. 🚀
Discord faces lawsuits alleging violations of child safety laws, adding pressure and complexity. ⚖️
There is concern about privacy violations and the potential creation of a black market for identity verification. 💳
The video suggests that instead of solving problems, these measures might create new ones, like privacy breaches. 🔍
Discord's scanning feature is available only in the UK and Australia, raising fairness issues globally. 🌍

Overview

In recent times, Discord has introduced sweeping changes in their ID verification processes involving AI face scans or ID submissions, aimed at better controlling access by age groups. Initially hailed as a protective measure to prevent underage users from accessing inappropriate content, these practices have now taken on a more dystopian vibe. Users find this drastic shift rather invasive as it expands beyond its original purpose.

Notably, these changes are driven by governmental pressures, particularly from the UK and Australia, who are setting rigorous benchmarks for online safety that companies like Discord are forced to comply with. These countries threaten companies with hefty fines and legal actions if they fail to adhere to the new standards. Critics argue these practices present severe privacy invasions, offering negligible solutions to the core problems they're meant to address.

The video compellingly critiques the superficial efforts of such policies to safeguard users, especially young ones, from online threats. Despite purported noble intentions, those intentions appear undermined by the use of privacy-breaching methods, underscoring a larger discussion about internet privacy and governmental overreach. As these narratives unfold, Discord finds itself embroiled in lawsuits, navigating the complexities of user safety, compliance, and privacy protection across different regions.

Chapters

00:00 - 04:00: Discord's Dystopian AI Face Scanning The chapter discusses a controversial new feature on Discord that requires users to either scan their face with AI or provide ID to access specific parts of the platform. Initially introduced as a positive update for age verification, the feature now raises privacy concerns and feels dystopian. Discord is also under pressure due to threats of an $18 million fine from the government and a lawsuit related to child safety. This situation has made the implementation of the new feature more problematic.
04:00 - 08:00: AI Verification in UK and Australia The chapter discusses the challenges with Discord's traditional support system which is largely run by AI and can be slow to respond, particularly when users appeal bans. It highlights a specific instance where the introduction of a new AI face scanning feature helped a user get unbanned quickly. This feature verifies users' age groups efficiently, demonstrating its effectiveness compared to previous methods. However, it’s currently only available in the UK and Australia, leading some users from other regions to employ VPNs as a workaround to access this service.
08:00 - 12:00: Using NordVPN to Bypass Restrictions The chapter discusses the concerns around privacy when using NordVPN to bypass restrictions, specifically focusing on the issue of face scanning with AI for verification purposes on Discord. It highlights that the face scanning is done by a third-party company, KID, which claims to process information only for verification without storing it. However, there is skepticism about such claims given the involvement of big companies like Google, Capcom, and Discord. The chapter also points out that Discord's update to this feature has worsened the situation by not just scanning faces for unbanning but expanding its use.
12:00 - 16:00: Critique of Face Scanning and Privacy Concerns This chapter discusses the implementation of face scanning by Discord, which is being used to verify users' ages, particularly when accessing sensitive content. The author critiques the efficacy and privacy implications of this technology, noting that it often incorrectly flags benign images as sensitive. This raises concerns about privacy and the potential for unnecessary intrusion into users' interactions on the platform. The critique highlights a broader issue of technological overreach in personal privacy.
16:00 - 20:00: Government Regulations and Their Flaws The chapter discusses the issues with government regulations, highlighting the intrusive use of AI technologies for content moderation and identity verification. It uses a specific example involving Discord's policy on sensitive content, where users are required to scan their faces to access certain media. This practice is presented as a dystopian measure, especially for teenagers who might find it overly invasive. The text critiques the effectiveness and fairness of applying these AI systems, emphasizing that such methods are only applicable in certain countries like Australia and the UK, despite affecting global users.
20:00 - 26:00: Discord Lawsuit Over Child Safety The chapter discusses a Discord lawsuit related to child safety. The specific focus is on age-restricted channels and the measures Discord uses to verify a user's age. It mentions that Discord prompts users to either scan their face using AI or scan their ID to access adult content channels. The chapter also briefly references the use of VPN services, introducing NordVPN as a partner beside the discussed topic.
26:00 - 30:00: Criticism of UK Online Safety Act In the chapter titled 'Criticism of UK Online Safety Act,' the speaker discusses their use of NordVPN on a daily basis to maintain online privacy, particularly when exploring potentially harmful websites for content creation purposes. They emphasize the VPN's role in hiding their IP address from scammers who might seek retaliation through methods like DDoS attacks. Additionally, the speaker mentions using the VPN to circumvent Discord server bans, suggesting its utility in accessing restricted online environments. However, this chapter's actual focus seems to diverge from the suggested criticism of the UK Online Safety Act, predominantly highlighting personal cybersecurity practices instead.
30:00 - 33:00: Final Thoughts The narrator discusses methods to bypass bans on Discord servers using VPN services like NordVPN. They explain that using a VPN can allow someone to change their IP address to evade bans and access content restricted to certain countries. The narrator specifically mentions using this technique for accessing Discord's AI face scanning feature available only in the UK and Australia, implying it can also be used to access region-specific content on platforms like Netflix.

This is how Discord Dies… Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 this is how Discord dies because Discord is now forcing you to scan your face with AI or scan your ID to access certain parts of Discord now believe it or not this feature started off as a good thing and then Discord gave it an update and now it feels dystopian and now with the government threatening Discord with an $18 million fine and Discord being sued for child safety it's about to make everything even worse now like I said initially this face scanning feature was a pretty good idea by Discord because if you go on Discord and you joke about your age saying you're 6 years old someone can report that and you can get banned off Discord for being underage the problem though is that when
00:30 - 01:00 you try to appeal nothing happens because Discord support is AI and Discord takes forever to do anything in fact one of my viewers got banned and completely ignored by Discord but when they used this AI face scanning feature Discord verified their age group and realized "Oh he's not 6 years old he's a teenager that's crazy." and in less than 5 minutes he was unbanned now unfortunately this feature is only available to people in the UK or Australia so they had to use a hacky workaround with a VPN but it worked they got unbanned from Discord in 5 minutes for scanning their face now do you feel
01:00 - 01:30 like scanning your face with AI is an invasion of your privacy just so you can get unbanned from Discord well don't you worry because it's not Discord that's scanning your face it's a third party company called KID now KD does say your information is processed for verification purposes only and is not stored but in this day and age I don't trust any big company even if apparently they are trusted by Google Capcom and Discord but like I said Discord updated this feature and made it worse because Discord didn't just want to scan your face to unban you on Discord it started
01:30 - 02:00 asking for your age for other parts of Discord if someone sends you a message that Discord says may contain sensitive content if you try unblurring this image Discord will show you that popup asking you to verify your age now when I first saw this I thought Discord was trying to solve the Goonar problem on Discord especially teenagers using Discord instead of the hub or any adult website but here's the thing as someone that uses Discord all the time this filter it's horrible imagine your friend sent you a completely normal image of something and Discord thinks that the
02:00 - 02:30 meme you sent is sensitive content if you try unblocking it you will need to scan your face with AI and if you're a 16-year-old Discord says you're a teenager and you can't see the photo and there's nothing you can do about it do you not like scanning your face does it feel dystopian well don't you worry because there's another thing that will make you scan your face and this will be devastating for the Discord gooners but I'm on my alt account and I enabled this experiment to make this whole system work and considering this AI face scanning only works in Australia or the UK and you should be able to tell I am neither Australian nor British in it i
02:30 - 03:00 also had to use a VPN and VPN into the United Kingdom but on my account if I try accessing an age restricted channel Discord will tell me "This channel is marked as age restricted because it contains adult content do you want to verify your age group to access this channel?" And when you go to verify your age again it asks you to scan your face with AI or scan your ID now since I talked about a VPN oh so conveniently it's time to talk about this video's partner NordVPN now instead of reading some boring script I'm just going to
03:00 - 03:30 tell you how I use NordVPN almost every single day now first I use NordVPN to hide my IP from scammers when I visit sketchy scam websites and I expose them in videos if the scammers want revenge they could do my IP and boot me off the internet but before I visit the website if I turn on NordVPN it will hide my IP so I don't even have to worry about being dodos also if you play on like sketchy GTA or Gmod servers this might be a good idea to look into now I also use NordVPN to bypass Discord server bans uh don't tell Discord about this by the way but funny enough some bad
03:30 - 04:00 Discord servers will ban my account so I can't investigate them and when I go on an alt account I'm still banned because Discord will ban your IP but I just use NordVPN to change my IP and now I can join the server with no problems at all and finally I use NordVPN to trick websites into thinking I'm from a different country so this Discord AI face scanning thing I'm talking about only works in the UK and Australia so all I have to do is just go to the UK and kaboom and now I can make this video and by the way you can also do the same thing with like Netflix if you want to
04:00 - 04:30 get country specific shows if you want to watch Netflix in France which would just be torture and with NordVPN 7,000 high-speed servers that span over 118 countries I have a lot of countries covered now if you use my link in the description nordvpn.com/notexttospech you get four bonus months with a purchase of a 2-year plan and if you don't like it you get a 30-day money back guarantee at nordvpn.com/noexttoech and again Pooky Bear get this offer at nordvpn.com/notexttospech all right so getting back to the video i don't go on
04:30 - 05:00 Discord to watch adult content but unfortunately a lot of adults and teenagers do as well i think people need to stop using Discord a chatting app for adult content because you can't get groomed on the hub's comments you can get groomed on Discord though but just think about it for a second if you go on the hub and they tell you to scan your face if the system that scans my face gets hacked and starts storing people's faces last thing I want is my face before the goon sesh being leaked on some sort of website that is like a
05:00 - 05:30 recipe for getting blackmailed and I think I can speak on behalf of everyone but I and I think most people don't like having to scan their face just to see age restricted content on Discord i understand the premise here they're trying to keep kids safe but this is like the worst way of going about it i want to point out though if you thought things couldn't get any worse they do your account may be banned if your age is below the minimum requirement if you believe the result is incorrect you could submit an appeal through the underage appeal process here if you have
05:30 - 06:00 a baby face and you're a teenager and the AI thinks you're under 13 you can get banned off Discord and the best part is that apparently it happened to someone on Reddit already a friend tried to do the Face ID thing and despite being a grown ass adult they had their Discord account seized because they thought they were under 13 we are already off to a fantastic start now the question when it comes to any Discord feature is why is Discord doing this if Discord adds a specific feature that seems privacy invasive you know scanning your face i don't know chief that sounds like an invasion of privacy to me
06:00 - 06:30 anytime Discord does anything that will 100% be unpopular in a specific country it's because these specific countries are forcing Discord to do this and with that folks I want to give you a quick warning in the next part of the video I talk about old people who just don't understand the internet so if you're allergic to incompetent boomers just continue watching the video but have an epipen on hand but let's talk about the Australian and the UK government basically trying to kill Discord the Australian government is protecting young Australians at a critical stage of their development through world first social media age restrictions so the the
06:30 - 07:00 Australian government is stopping you from visiting social media if you don't meet the mandatory minimum age of 16 when you're able to drive a car in Australia as a learner you now have the skills to handle Instagram that's how bat insane this stuff is they will let you drive a 4,000lb death machine a car and crash it into like the side of a highway killing your whole entire family and that is the same age you need to be to sign up for Instagram or Discord but to get things back on topic Discord is making this age face scan verification
07:00 - 07:30 available in Australia most likely to see if the AI can distinguish between a 15-year-old someone who can't crash into a family of five on the highway and a 16-year-old they're giving the AI face scanning feature a test drive and my oh my ladies and gentlemen that test drive went phenomenally because people have already bypassed the AI like just to give you an example there's Reddit posts of people complaining about how this is a massive breach of privacy and the first comment was "A buddy of mine used a VPN to bypass it." that you know which VPN to use wink wink nudge nudge in another post where people were
07:30 - 08:00 complaining about this someone said "I'm 19 i tried with the video selfie and it kept insisting I was under 18 purely because I still have a slight bit of a baby face on me i ended up having to intentionally scrunch up my face just to get it to recognize me as an adult." Insert the Dean Norris meme you have normal happy face you're under 18 get your scrunchy frowny face instantly 52 ladies and gentlemen you can bypass AI by giving it the stink eye this so stupid you got to understand kids are crafty [ __ ] I tell you i did my AI face verification with a tweet called
08:00 - 08:30 VCAM on my jailbroken iPhone and then downloaded a video from Tik Tok with someone staring into the camera i managed to find one with some guy opening his mouth a few times and it worked so this person just used a video from Tik Tok of an old person which there's tons of because old people love Tik Tok for some reason they also point out that you can just get a friend to do it because if you do it on your computer it'll give you a QR code telling you to scan it with your phone you can just send that QR code to someone and they can do the face verification for you and just in case the government thinks people are stupid there will be 20-year-olds or people that look over 18
08:30 - 09:00 that will do face verifications for other people and they'll charge them like a dollar there were people that would sell a Discord clan tag feature for money it's not that far of a reach to say that there will be a black market community of age verification and if you're someone that doesn't want your face scan to be given to some random AI company that you've never heard of before well don't you worry because I'm on my Discord account here you can see that the age group is unverified they don't know if I'm an adult or if I'm a kid and there's a Venord plugin called NSFW Gate bypass i am now in the adult
09:00 - 09:30 age group and if I press on escape this is the exact same account by the way i can just visit the age restricted channel so people that don't like getting their privacy invaded or teenagers that want to bypass this stuff they will find ways to and just when you thought governments were stupid let's move on to the UK's government because the UK government passed Offcom's online safety act the point of the online safety act is a whole bunch of laws that protects children and adults online now hot take here for a second i don't want the government to protect me as a grown ass adult with a fully functioning
09:30 - 10:00 developed frontal lobe okay maybe not that developed but I'm an adult why is the government trying to protect me from the internet and don't worry this whole thing gets even more insane so the main point of the online safety act is for kids the most important and most relevant part of the online safety act is that websites need to prevent children from accessing online adult content and the way to do so is through age assurance now this is effective immediately for any adult website that published their own adult content but websites like Discord need to also check
10:00 - 10:30 if children are accessing adult content with a deadline of April 16th 2025 which has already passed so this whole entire paragraph explains why Discord has that AI face feature for people in the UK and if you don't follow these guidelines then congratulations because you get completely because in the online safety act companies can be fined up to 18 million Great British pounds or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue whichever is greater whichever is greater not only do you get fined up the
10:30 - 11:00 wazoo but criminal action can also be taken against senior managers who fail to ensure companies follow information requests from offcom now if Discord got fined 18 million great British pounds I'd laugh the problem though is that this punishment it actually a big part of the internet because big companies like Discord can deal with this they have a whole bunch of people money lawyers but what about other websites you know those small little forms that teach you how to repair your 2004 base model Toyota Echo and that's the only place you can find that information they
11:00 - 11:30 don't really have the resources to deal with this 4,000page act and make sure have like face AI scanning thing for children so you want to know what that means that Toyota car form that is based in the UK or whatever you're using gets fined up to 18 million great British pounds or they shut down i'm actually not joking there's news articles like this hundreds of websites to shut down under UK's chilling internet laws so now all those small websites which make the internet diverse get shut down and everyone now has to go to big platforms like Twitter so is this whole entire act
11:30 - 12:00 impeaching on people's free speech on the internet probably so this thing's already completely flawed from the start and it just gets worse cuz remember they're supposed to protect the adults sorry I can't keep it together but according to the online safety act adult users of such services will be able to verify their identity and access tools which enable them to reduce the likelihood that they see content from nonverified users and prevent non-verified users from interacting with their content this will help stop anonymous trolls from contacting them
12:00 - 12:30 the UK government is trying to stop trolling for good i don't know if you guys heard of bully hunters before this was 7 years ago basically there was a website that would try to stop bullies and they had this trailer if you can even call it a trailer where there are women gamers that were being harassed on Counterstrike now instead of just muting the person or reporting them in Counterstrike they would go to bully hunters they would get a certified bully hunter to join the game lobby to outamer the troll and then when the troll got angry they would say "Harassment is not
12:30 - 13:00 a game bully hunters.com." Now considering you haven't heard of bully hunters this thing flopped like a piece of the whole project got cancelled and the UK government was like this is brilliant and the way to stop anonymous trolls this is the biggest amount of is that for you to use a website you need to verify your identity and there's tools that people can use to reduce the likelihood that they see content from people that aren't verified so if you don't give up your privacy your content on social media just won't be shown to
13:00 - 13:30 people if they don't want it to this is inification from the government themselves and remember that lawsuit that's going to make everything worse well this is the lawsuit that's going to make everything worse so on April 17th The Verge reported that Discord gets sued for allegedly violating child safety laws and my goodness boy if you thought old people were stupid when it comes to the internet this lawsuit is an absolute heater let me tell you so the state of New Jersey is suing Discord because Discord says that its application is a safe space for teens now considering all the horrible
13:30 - 14:00 cesspools of Discord I look at it's not safe so it seems like this lawsuit is pretty good until you start reading what they're complaining about they're saying that children can easily make accounts on Discord as all that Discord requires to sign up as an email address and a date of birth if the user's age is above 13 if you're allowed on Discord Discord allows the user to create a username and a display name they specifically say "No real names are required." It was that quick to find boomers being stupid again if you go on any part of the internet it could be the
14:00 - 14:30 most wholesome stuff on the planet no one uses their real name on the internet and they're saying that and it makes it seem like they're saying that's a problem because they say while Discord states that it prohibits children under the age of 13 from using the application an underage child needs only to provide a false birthday to create an account hello reality to the state of New Jersey every single website asks for a birthday and you could lie about it you could go on Steam say your birthday is in like the 1900s and it will allow you to see Doom Eternal they dead ass put this in
14:30 - 15:00 their lawsuit which means that if this goes through there is a possibility that Discord would be forced maybe in the future or by more government pressure but Discord might be forced to make people scan their face just to create an account so they can ensure whether or not you're a child and that is the most dystopian I have ever heard and I don't think that's the end of what is kind of being pushed here because they're also saying that no real names are required i don't want to sound alarmist here but with this lawsuit is this person wanting
15:00 - 15:30 you to sign up for websites using your real name this seems insane to me like I hope you guys can see this is a slippery slope like I'm hoping Discord isn't going limp dick with this and it does turn out that Discord is fighting this but Jesusing Christ how can people not see through this and see they want our real names for social media and they want a way to make sure that we say who we are bye-bye internet privacy it doesn't exist anymore because the government wants to protect kids remember how I was talking about being allergic to old people being stupid this
15:30 - 16:00 is when you need your EpiPen because in the lawsuit they say that Discord servers have administrators who control a given server and may have moderators or mods who are selected by the server admin and granted certain authority to manage the server typical stuff we're used to but they say that any Discord user regardless of age can create a server or become a moderator and Discord does not require education or training for moderators to identify or respond to a potential violation of its terms of service or community guidelines this lawsuit is alleging that Discord
16:00 - 16:30 moderators aren't formally trained so when people talk in Discord servers children are being put at risk that is quite a reach now if you wanted to scoop your eyeballs out already it gets worse because in the lawsuit they talk about how children face significant risks on the application they say a child under the age of 13 who is reported to Discord may be banned for violating the terms of service you know the underage ban or a predator found to have circulated CSAM content may be banned under Discord's community guidelines and this is true but if you get banned off Discord you can do the simple process of just making a new Discord account and the attorney
16:30 - 17:00 general that is putting forth this lawsuit is proposing that the potential solution and the reason why this ban evasion happens is because Discord's base application requires no monetary payment so the solution is to make people pay to use Discord what is this dude even trying to say man this won't solve anything in fact it'll just make less people use Discord because if you have to pay to use Discord no one's going to use it they're going to go to a different platform that's free to sign up for and that platform is going to have the exact same problem that this
17:00 - 17:30 dude is saying what is the solution here all right while I was editing this I realized that there is a disgusting piece of irony in this whole entire lawsuit because we have the government suing Discord because a predator who got caught for circulating CSAM content they can just make a new Discord account this is coming from the government the people that should be putting this caught predator behind bars but instead of doing that they're suing Discord this should really make it clear what the motive of this lawsuit is in my opinion now I'll have this lawsuit linked in the description if you want to read through it a lot of it is just talking about
17:30 - 18:00 predators on Discord and how Discord isn't inherently keeping kids safe and that's the biggest problem here there's a study that estimates that one in 12 children are subjected to online internet crimes this is a serious problem parents and kids need to understand that the internet isn't inherently safe you can't just throw your kid on Roblox throw them on Discord look at the website oh it's safe for kids that's good no every single website will have predators on it you can't throw them an iPad and say "Oh good luck." At the end of the day the government nor any internet website
18:00 - 18:30 gives a about your specific child but the real problem is that governments need to give more resources to law enforcement that investigate grooming cases i hate to break it to you but like the NCMEC doesn't have enough resources to tackle the massive grooming problem that exists on the internet the governments are completely misguided again I don't know if they're trying to boil the frog and get you used to having your privacy invaded or if they're just trying to do lip service and seem like a good government we can keep passing these laws that we pretend do something but at the end of the day if the people
18:30 - 19:00 that are putting the predators behind bars don't have enough resources to do so what's the point anyways gamers I think that's all that really needs to be said i don't want to drag this on for too much longer feel free to agree or disagree with me in the comments but if I think you're cyberbullying me I'm going to report you to the UK government anyways gamers bye-bye i love you mwah