Discord Introduces New Family Controls

Discord is a text and voice chat platform popular in the gaming space and communities. As such, it is a platform with a lot of teen users on it. It has recently announced the addition of a new Family Center that tries to improve safety on the platform in a collaborative way. 

The goal of the new Family Center is to encourage an open and honest dialogue between teens and parents. Crucially teens have to sign up for the process themselves – and this ensures a dialogue happens between parent and child first. Parents won’t see the content of teens’ messages once they sign up – but like in the real world – they will get a better understanding of who their teen is talking to, who they are hanging out with and the communities they are part of. In a recent blog post announcing the feature, the company said:

“Similar to how parents know who their teens are friends with and what clubs they’re a part of at school, Family Center helps them learn more about who their teens are friends with and talk to on Discord. Our goal with Family Center is to help foster productive dialogue about safer internet habits, and to create mutually beneficial ways for parents and teens to connect about experiences online.”

Parents will receive emails weekly summarising their teens activity. And there is a Family Dashboard on the app that shares the same information. That information includes the number of users they have messaged or called, number of new friends they added and how many servers they are participating in.