Fewer than 1% of parents use social media tools to monitor their children's accounts, tech companies say
Most parents whose children are on tech platforms such as Snapchat and Discord aren’t using parenting tools the companies designed for them.
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.
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