Discord has rolled out updates to its Family Center, giving guardians more information about their teens’ usage patterns, including purchases, top interactions, and time spent. The goal is to help parents monitor whether their teen is spending excessive time or money on Discord.
The communication platform Family Center debuted in 2023 with an activity dashboard showing which servers teens have joined and a weekly email summary to guardians of teens’ activity. The platform is now expanding these monitoring capabilities.
Guardians can now see the total purchases a teen has made in the past week, including items from Discord’s Shop and Nitro subscriptions (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 have interacted with in the past seven days. This comes after other social networks Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat It 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 direct message 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 said that when teens report content on the platform, they now have the option to notify their parents or guardians of their actions. However, Discord said it will not reveal flagged content and encourages teens to discuss this matter directly with their parents instead.
“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.
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In recent months, several companies, including Meta, YouTube, and OpenAI, have rolled out updates to enhance their teen safety tools. Companies like OpenAI and Acter.AI have had to iterate their AI products to make them safer for teens.
