Discord, the Teen-Favored Chat Service, Is Finally Adding Parental Oversight

livemint.com:

Discord is finally bringing some parental supervision to its teen-heavy locker room of a chat service. The free messaging platform—which has long had a reputation as a Wild West for gamers—has grown to 150 million monthly active users since 2015. Two years ago, the company took steps to better police the site for child predators and block minors from seeing porn.

It stopped short of offering the kind of monitoring provided by competitors TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. But feedback from parents and digital-media experts led Discord to bring some new visibility to parents. Parents can now see who their teens befriend, when they messaged friends, how many people they have called, the communities they have joined and other details.

Discord isn’t meant to be used by kids under 13. Much like other social-media platforms, the company won’t share kids’ message content with parents. “We decided not to expose message content because we want to give teens agency over their experience," said Clint Smith, Discord’s chief legal officer, who oversees its trust and safety team.

The company also won’t offer time limits or other basic parental controls found on other platforms. (Parents can set these using built-in tools for iOS and Android.) How to access it Parents who create their own Discord account and connect with their teens can access a family center tool that provides them with information about their kids’ activity. Teens will have to open the Family Center settings and share a QR code with their parents, and then accept their parents’ request for supervision.