this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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How will an adult offering up their photo identification protect children? Let's say I'm a pedophile who's targeting children. Will I upload a video of my face or Government ID to prey on children on Discord, or will I pretend to be younger and not identify myself? Your argument makes no sense. Also, what are you talking about being an addict for? It's completely irrelevant here.
Isn't the entire point to "protect" the children from "being corrupted" by that evil porn and other adult content? It's not about protecting them from pedophiles, it's about keeping them nice and innocent so it's even easier for the pedophiles to groom them.
I'm only going to explain this once because this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are.
You didn't understand how this helps because you aren't trained to think like a child predator. (That's fine.) I've had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here's how online child predators work, they start by trying to get the kid into a secret. They say "hey want to see some porn?", and of course the kid is curious. And the kid is told, "be sure you don't tell your parents about this." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to black mail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.
The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.
How how did this protect kids? The goal is to keep the kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.
So there you go. I'm all ears for how to do this better.
And this is going to be stopped by giving Discord your ID?
Some of them, yes.
You see, one thing that child predators really really hate is policies. They want their interactions to be frictionless, so that at the first sign of trouble they can get out. Strong policies really are a strong deterrent.
It won't make the evil people stop doing the evil things, but it'll cause a lot of them to move to someone else's platform that has weaker policies.