Discord is significantly upgrading its Family Centre, granting parents and guardians more substantial safety tools and visibility into their teens’ activity. These new controls are designed to address concerns around sensitive content, data privacy, and unwanted contact, while still respecting the teens’ communication privacy.
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The most impactful change is the introduction of New Social Permissions toggles. Guardians can now directly control who can send their teens direct messages (DMs):
- Friends Only: DMs are restricted to users the teen has accepted as a friend.
- Anyone on the Same Server: DMs can come from friends and anyone who is a member of the same servers as the teen.
Crucially, Discord maintains its commitment to user privacy, reassuring teens that guardians can never see the content of the messages they send or receive.
The activity summary within the Family Centre is also becoming more robust, offering a richer dataset over a rolling seven-day period. Guardians will now be able to see:
- Total Purchases
- Total Call Minutes
- Top Users and Servers interacted with
See also
As before, teens have transparency and can view the exact same information their guardians see. Additionally, Discord is giving teens the option to notify their parents when they report another user, though the specifics of the report remain private.
It is important to note that the Family Centre remains completely voluntary. To establish the connection, a teen must willingly provide their parent or guardian with a QR code to scan and then must approve the connection after the scan. Guardians can see an overview of activity, but they cannot directly manage or control their teen’s friend list or server memberships.
These expanded features arrive as Discord, along with other major social media platforms, faces intense scrutiny from regulators and government bodies, particularly following Congressional hearings and legislative proposals like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). By proactively adding layers of protection, Discord is attempting to demonstrate that it can self-regulate and provide adequate safety features for its younger user base.
