Discord has added updates to its Family Center, giving parents more insights into teens’ usage habits, including purchases, top interactions, and time spent. The purpose is to assist parents in monitoring whether their teen is spending excessive time or money on Discord.
The social media communication platform first introduced Family Center in 2023 with an activity dashboard showing which servers their teens have joined and a weekly email summary for guardians about their teens’ usage. The platform is now extending these monitoring abilities.
Guardians can now witness total purchases made by the teen in the last week, including items from Discord’s Shop and Nitro subscriptions (Discord’s premium membership service).
Discord users will also gain insight into the total time spent on voice and video calls within direct messages (DMs), groups, and servers over the past week. Additionally, the platform will show the five users and servers with whom they interacted the most in the last seven days. This move follows similar restrictions implemented by other social networks, including Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, regarding contact with teenage users.
Additionally, Discord is also introducing new parental controls to the app with settings that can only be changed by guardians. They can now manage who can DM their teen and whether sensitive content should be filtered. Guardians can also manage data privacy controls for teens, deciding how Discord uses their data, including whether to show them personalized ads.
Discord explained that when teens report content on the platform, they now have an option to inform their parents or guardians of their action. However, the company said it won’t reveal what content was reported and encourages teens to discuss this directly with their guardians instead.
In a blog post, Discord said, “The new features allow guardians who have linked Family Center accounts to play a more active role in creating a safer space online for teens while still respecting their privacy.”
Companies are increasingly focusing on teen safety, leading to recent updates from several major players like Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI to enhance their safety tools. Notably, both OpenAI and Character.AI have had to repeatedly refine their AI products to ensure they are safer for teenage users.