Discord expands the security controls that parents and guardians have access to. Family centerincluding increased visibility into their teens' activity, allowing guardians to control sensitive content filtering and data privacy settings, and giving them more control over who can send private messages to their teens.
New social permission switches will allow guardians to choose whether their teens can only receive direct messages from friends or from everyone who is a member of the same servers as them. However, Discord still promises teens that “as always, guardians cannot see the content of messages you send.” This way, guardians will have some control over how accessible their children are to other users, but will still not have access to their messages.
Discord will also give teens the ability to notify their parents or guardians when they report someone, although the details of the report will remain private, as will their messages. Family Center will also display more data in the activity summary, including total purchases, total call minutes, and top users and servers over a seven-day period. As with the current activity summary, teens can see the same information as their caregivers.
The Family Center is still open. voluntary for both teenagers and caregivers – Teens must give parents a QR code to scan to connect accounts, and then approve the connection after scanning. Family Center allows caregivers to see an overview of what their teens are doing through an activity summary, but they can't directly control what servers their kids are on or who they're friends with on Discord.
Enhanced visibility and parental controls wave of age restrictions online, including on Discord, which began rolling out age verification in some regions earlier this year. Discord CEO also named among social media leaders appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year to meet with families of children killed by cyberbullying and online violence on their platforms. Social media platforms are under increasing pressure from proposals like the Child Online Safety Act, and Discord, like several others, is trying to demonstrate that it can take care of things on its own.
