Comment by Aurornis
8 days ago
> You are approaching this from a uniquely U.S. perspective.
It’s not uniquely U.S. at all
What other countries require ID checks for services like Discord?
The U.K.’s implementation of this law is much more unique than you’re claiming.
Discord’s own articles about this change explain that the fundamentals (content filtering) are applied to all accounts owned by teenagers worldwide. The only U.K. specific aspect of all of this is that if you tell Discord you are over 18 you must prove it. That’s a very small difference and not something most people in most countries care about. I’d go as far as to say, I think the majority of people in the majority of the world would be in favour of requiring people to prove they’re over 18 online if they want to claim to be over 18 online.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/33362401287959...
> The only U.K. specific aspect of all of this is that if you tell Discord you are over 18 you must prove it. That’s a very small difference
Requiring ID verification in one country is not a small difference.
The rest of the world checks a box. People in the U.K. must submit to ID verification.
It’s so strange to see things like this claimed to be small differences.
Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view. Normal people do not think that proving you are 18 is notable. We’ve been doing it for decades with credit cards. The system is more mature now but it is not fundamentally different.
6 replies →
You don’t need age verification to access all of Discord, just NSFW servers. You can certainly argue that that’s an unjustifiable interference in people’s freedom to access the internet services that they want to access. But please don’t exaggerate.
> You don’t need age verification to access all of Discord, just NSFW servers.
That’s not correct. The Discord support explains that it’s required to change automatic content filtering or unblur any content that gets caught by the automatic filters.
Yes, that’s what I meant. You can still access Discord, just not any content that’s detected as NSFW. Generally speaking that content will be on NSFW servers (the kind that e.g. the iPhone app would block you from accessing by default).
Obviously there is not going to be a “nah I really want to see this tho” button, or the age check would be completely pointless.
3 replies →