Discord to enforce face scans to access full content, harming children and adults alike

A newly announced change to Discord services and functionality spells harm through increased surveillance potential.

By Jane Migliara Brigham & Artemis T. Douglas

This morning, Feb. 9, Discord announced that it will require users to submit to face scans in order to access the full features of the app.  

Starting next month, those who refuse to upload scans of their faces to the company servers will be assumed to be teenagers, and prevented from using basic features such as receiving direct messages from people not on their friends lists, accessing what the automated system deems to be “adult content”, and will be given warning notices when anyone sends them a friend request.

These restrictions will make it incredibly difficult for anyone that is not verified as an adult to use the platform.

These new restrictions would land hardest on those who rely on online spaces to build community, such as teenagers and queer people. 

Teenagers would be banned from many core features of the app, while queer people have ample reasons to avoid having their faces captured as part of a massive database.  

Seeing as queer children are among the most isolated people in our society, cutting off a central means by which they are able to interact with one another will be disastrous for their social lives.

By disregarding their user’s interests, Discord, Inc. is putting the presumed future preferences of the government above that of the reason they make money.

Tech firms are unaccountable private entities, but that doesn’t stop them from collaborating with the state. 

Ring cameras are a more obvious example of tech firms freely collaborating with authoritarian interests, where footage in their database is accessible to law enforcement without a warrant, meaning every Ring camera is a surveillance tool for police and federal law enforcement.

While more obfuscated, online “safety” efforts that involve IDs and/or facial scans serve the same purpose of empowering surveillance. 

Worse, given that Discord is a service for private, semi-private and public communities alike, people’s digital activity in discord can be sensitive and only shared with the expectation of it staying within that server’s context, with potential pseudonymity. 

With this new rollout, Discord is forcing its users to submit their faces to a private database that is also tied to their online activity behind virtual “closed doors”, which is a breach of privacy and an erosion of safety. 

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This would be true in most contexts. However, the specific context of 2026 means that such a database, regardless of the discord developers’ and the intentions of the company who owns Discord, will inevitably become a target for various governments.

Worse still is that in the US, the UK, and many other states, civil and human rights frameworks have been weaponized against equality and inclusivity. 

The very marginalized peoples who flock to services like discord are often already seeking refuge from the storm of supremacist and fascist politics in an attempt to carve out community, support, and connection.

The company behind Discord is not beholden to its userbase; it's beholden to whatever government it is operating in. Discord, Inc. is based in San Francisco, CA, and therefore exists at the whims of the California State and the U.S. Federal Government. 

Discord’s announcement favors the very forces that much of their own user base is trying to find safety from.

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