In the ongoing crazy saga of the internet getting gated behind new age verification laws, Discord are putting on the brakes temporarily.

Writing in a new blog post Discord CTO & Co-Founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy mentioned they “knew this rollout was going to be controversial” and that “In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works” and that with the way it was explained resulting in people thinking everyone had to go through age checks that they “failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we’re doing and why”.

For regions where it is already law that they have to do age checks, because they count as social media, the current rules will be sticking. So that’s the UK, Australia and soon Brazil too. And naturally, as more countries roll out these required age checks - those will be forced as well.