Most parents whose children are on tech platforms such as Snapchat and Discord aren’t using parenting tools the companies designed for them, despite rising concerns around online child safety.
Data shared by Discord and Snapchat, both tech platforms favored by teenagers, after the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January on online child safety shows staggeringly low rates of adoption of platform-provided tools for parents to monitor their children’s social media activity.
On both platforms, fewer than 1% of minors have parents who use tools to monitor them.
During the congressional hearings, the CEOs of some of the biggest social media companies were grilled about the issue of child sexual exploitation on their platforms. Written follow-up questions from various senators were then submitted to each platform, and those platforms sent their responses to the Judiciary Committee in late March.
In their lengthy responses, Discord and Snapchat disclosed how many parents are using their parenting tools. X does not have parenting tools, while TikTok and Meta did not provide detailed data about the use of their parenting tools.
Discord CEO Jason Citron noted that out of more than 150 million global users — with approximately 2.7 million monthly active users under age 18 in the U.S. alone — only 15,000 parents are connected to 15,500 children’s accounts through the Discord Family Center. That means less than 1% of underage Discord users have a parent monitoring their account with the platform’s tools.
Most of the social media platforms called in front of Congress have resources called “parent centers” or “family centers.” These digital centers offer guides and tools to help parents monitor and even control the ability of their children to access certain content or features within each platform. The tools involve syncing a parent’s account with their child’s account. The only platform that doesn’t offer parent-child account syncing is X, formerly called Twitter.
Discord launched its family center in the summer of 2023, soon after NBC News reported an “explosive growth” in child sexual exploitation cases involving the platform. The family center, according to the Senate documents, allows parents to receive insights about the Discord communities and servers that their teen children have joined, the online friends they’ve chatted with on the platform and the amount of time their children spend on it weekly.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote that, out of 60 million global daily active users under the age of 18, only 200,000 parents are linked to 400,000 teens’ accounts using Snapchat’s family center. That’s slightly better than Discord’s rate of adoption, but still less than 1% of underage Snapchat users are being monitored by their parents with Snapchat’s tools.
Similar to Discord’s family center, the Snapchat family center allows parents to view and manage how their children are using the platform on a weekly basis, including whether and if they can chat with Snapchat’s “My AI” artificial intelligence chatbot.
Parent and family centers have been some of the favored solutions of social media platforms to escalating concerns about child safety. Many lawmakers and parents have pushed for harder regulation of social media platforms that would force the companies to limit capabilities for minors or set default settings for minors as more restrictive. Despite the existence of parental control tools, parents have complained that children can oftentimes sidestep or circumnavigate them.
