How does anyone know whether a family is engaging in that time-honored tradition of passing down accounts from grandfather, to father, to son, to child, and their posterity, in perpetuity?
Seriously though, unless you have positively identified the person who created the account in the first place, you have 0% chance of knowing whether it is the same person using it today.
Gamers sell their high-level accounts all the time. It would be a simple matter of economics that the Discord users with the oldest accounts sell them to 12-year-olds. Likewise, accounts are shared willy-nilly, whether or not that violates the rules. And accounts can be stolen or compromised, if you're really hard up.
This may seem like hyperbole, but this is the reality for students and test-takers every day in virtual environments now.
I assisted as TA in a virtual learning environment. While we didn't make it strictly mandatory to keep the camera on, our learners were encouraged to do it, and we kept tabs on who was "engaged" and present, because at the very least, we needed to tabulate an attendance roll for every day.
If you're taking a standardized test, whether you're at home or in a controlled lab, the camera will always be on. Multiple ones. Not optional.
There is a large storm of controversy on college campuses about adapting young students early to surveillance cultures. I attended a community college about 7 years ago, and I felt I'd be a second-class citizen without a smartphone and an SMS'able mobile.
We weren't surveilled through smartphones at the time. But there was an app to receive campus alerts about public safety and other crisis events. And our virtual class sessions had various ways of ensuring we were human, and awake.
Taking finals and certification exams, I was often sat in a special-purpose testing center, and Step One was showing ID; Step Two was surrendering my watch, my phone, my wallet to place in a locker outside. So, students simply become accustomed to showing ID and being on-camera, and it becomes a fact of life before you graduate.
No law or regulation is ever 100% effective in real life. Income tax is not collected 100% effectively. Should we not do it? Criminals are not caught 100% of the time, should we not do it?
Of course this won't be 100% effective, maybe 80-90% effective. That's all they need and expect from this system.
HN is constantly obsessed with is it perfectly effective?
No law, none, is perfectly effective. Speed limits certainly aren’t self enforcing, but remove your neighborhood’s speed limits first if you truly believe laws must be demonstrated perfect.
But under that argument, you would have to prove your age on a regular basis, the plan right now appears to be that each account would only need to do so once.
You agree not to license, sell, lend, or transfer your account, Discord username, vanity URL, or other unique identifier without our prior written approval. We also reserve the right to delete, change, or reclaim your username, URL, or other identifier.
If transfer of accounts is a policy violation, then Discord has legal cover to confidently assert that, once ID is verified, the ID'd person is the owner and controller of the account thereafter.
Account selling, stealing, and sharing will certainly still happen, but that's grounds for banning, and not Discord's legal liability anymore.
Just ban that in TOS. As we know TOS is inviolable. As such it is not possible to sell, gift or otherwise transfer an account. At least this should be considered how it works for age verification. If account transfer is found out account can be terminated thus closing the loop hole.
Seriously though, unless you have positively identified the person who created the account in the first place, you have 0% chance of knowing whether it is the same person using it today.
Gamers sell their high-level accounts all the time. It would be a simple matter of economics that the Discord users with the oldest accounts sell them to 12-year-olds. Likewise, accounts are shared willy-nilly, whether or not that violates the rules. And accounts can be stolen or compromised, if you're really hard up.