Discord announces new Family Center tool to improve online safety for minors

In an attempt to make its platform more kid-friendly, Discord unveiled a new tool called Family Center on Tuesday that makes it easy for parents and guardians to keep an eye on their kids’ activities. Discord is the go-to social media platform for gamers and hobbyists of all ages to connect and interact with each other and can be accessed on several platforms such as desktops, smartphones, or gaming consoles such as Xbox and PlayStation. The new Family Center is yet another attempt by the platform to improve the platform experience, inculcate safer internet practices, and create a more family-friendly environment.

Family Center tool

Discord’s new Family Center is an opt-in tool that allows parents to keep an eye on their kid’s activity on the platform. It helps the parents learn more about who their kids are friends with and talk to in the gaming community. This new feature has two main components - an activity dashboard and a weekly email summary containing all the activity information. The Dashboard gives parents an overview of their kid’s activities such as their recently added friends, servers joined or participated in, and the number of users they have chatted with or called. However, parents won’t be able to see the contents of the messages.

Apart from this, parents or guardians will also receive a weekly summary of their kids’ activities on Discord via email. The Family Center can be found in user settings, although you will have to get your kid’s consent before using this feature.

Announcing the launch of the Family Center, Discord said in a statement, “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.”

Previous measures

This is not Discord’s first attempt at cleaning up its platform. In June 2022, Discord announced AutoMod, an automatic keyword filter that helps moderators by detecting and blocking harmful messages and threats in a server or text in voice messages. This means even if the moderator is not present, the AutoMod tool automatically detects and blocks the message while sending an alert to the moderator, who can then screen the flagged message upon return.