Owing to the pressure from lawmakers on children’s online safety, Snapchat added a new Family Centre this week. With this, parents will be able to see with whom their children are interacting with recently.
Though they won’t be able to see the chat content, parents can report someone from their children’s friends list if they deem it harmful or against Snap policies. Over time, Snapchat intends to add more parental controls to the new Family Centre.
Snapchat Family Centre
One of the most popular social media platforms among youngsters – Snapchat is subject to online safety rules as any other platform. Alongside TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, lawmakers often call Snapchat to introduce rules for improving the safety of underaged people on their platform.
And as it promised last year, Snap announced a new Family Center section on its Snapchat. With this, parents of underaged (13-17 years) kids will be able to monitor their children’s activity on Snapchat to an extent.
For example, they can see the entire friends list of their children, and with whom they interact in the last seven days. Though they can’t see what they’re talking about, parents have the ability to report someone from their kid’s friends list to Snap if deemed harmful.
The Family Centre is a voluntary thing, says Snap. Parents must send their kids an invitation link before tracking them. And kids have the complete freedom to accept or deny the request. Plus, this applies to only accounts of age under 18. So the account holder turning 18 will automatically deactivate the Family Centre on their account.
Snap is planning to add more features to the Family Centre, like the ability to see newest friends of their teens and other content controls. Earlier this year, Snapchat started restricting the ability to find underaged accounts in Quick Add section, to limit their visibility on the platform.
