Discord Unveils New Parental Controls to Keep Tabs on Your Kids

Discord, the go-to social network for notoriously level-headed and respectful gamers, wants to make its platform more kid friendly. The company unveiled the Family Center Tuesday, a new tool to help parents and guardians keep an eye on their child’s activity on the app.

The Family Center is a tool parents will have to opt into, but once they do, they’ll be greeted with metrics and data on how their child is spending time on Discord. The new feature has two main components: an activity dashboard and a weekly email report. The dashboard includes data on the amount of users the child has called or messaged, the number of friends they’ve added, and how many servers the child is a member of—the dashboard will not reveal the content of any messages the child user has sent, either written or spoken. The email report contains a summary of those data and is emailed to the parents once a week.

“Family Center provides parents with what they need to help guide their teen’s use of Discord without invading their privacy,” said Larry Magid in a press release shared with Gizmodo. Magid is the CEO of ConnectSafely.org, one of Discord’s partners on the project. “It’s like the physical world where you know who your kids are hanging out with and where they’re going but not listening in on their conversations or micromanaging their relationships.”

Parents can enroll in the Family Center by heading to User Settings and clicking Family Center. Both the parent and the child will need to complete the setup for the parent to have access to the Family Center.

The Family Center is Discord’s latest attempt at cleaning up its platform. Last year, the company unveiled an autonomous content moderation tool called AutoMod that filters keywords in order to help moderators more quickly detect foul play on the platform. This past October, The Gamer reported that Discord self-disclosed in a quarterly safety report that over 55 million user accounts and over 68 thousand servers were shutdown between January and June as they were spam or spam-related.