Discord has released updates to its Family Center, providing guardians with more detailed insights into their teens’ activity on the platform. These new features are designed to help parents monitor whether their teen is spending too much time or money on Discord.
The communication platform first introduced Family Center in 2023 with a dashboard showing which servers their teens had joined and a weekly email summary for guardians. The platform is now expanding these monitoring capabilities.
Guardians can now see the total purchases made by the teen in the last week. This includes items from Discord’s Shop and Nitro subscriptions, which is Discord’s premium membership service.
They can also view the total time spent on voice and video calls in direct messages, groups, and servers over the past week. Additionally, Discord will display the top five users and servers that teens interacted with in the last seven days. This follows similar moves by other social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, which have also implemented restrictions on who can contact teens.
Discord is also adding new parental controls to the app with settings that can only be changed by guardians. They can now control who can send direct messages to their teen and whether sensitive content should be filtered. Guardians can also manage data privacy controls for teens, determining how Discord uses their data, including whether to show them personalized ads.
The company also stated that when teens report content on the platform, they now have an option to notify their parents or guardians of their action. However, Discord said it will not disclose what content was reported and encourages teens to discuss this directly with their guardians.
The new features allow guardians who have linked Family Center accounts to play a more active role in creating a safer online space for teens while still respecting their privacy, Discord said in a blog post.
In recent months, several other companies, including Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI, have rolled out updates to bolster their tools around teen safety. Companies like OpenAI and Character.AI have had to iterate on their AI products to make them safer for teens.