Apps & Consumer
Meta brings parental supervision tools to Threads
Meta is rolling out parental supervision tools to Threads, letting parents and guardians view a teen's time on the app, set daily limits, adjust sleep mode, and manage privacy settings through Family Center.
Meta announced on Tuesday that Threads is getting parental supervision tools, extending controls already available across the company’s other apps to its text-based platform. Parents and guardians will be able to see how much time their teen spent on Threads each day over the past week, including their average daily time for the week, and can set a daily time limit or block access during specific days and hours. If a teen uses Threads on multiple devices, such as a phone and a laptop, the time limit applies to their total usage across all of them.
Parents can also limit or block a teen’s access to Threads at night. Notifications are muted and auto-replies are already turned on by default for all teens between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and parents can additionally control who is allowed to tag their teen in posts. Threads already applies default protections for teen accounts, including private accounts and limits on the content they see, but parents can now decide whether teens under 16 are permitted to loosen any of those automatic settings.
The rollout follows growing pressure on Meta from regulators and lawmakers to better protect young users, and comes as the company, alongside other social media platforms, faces numerous lawsuits related to child safety. Meta has spent the past several years expanding parental controls across its apps in response to concerns over excessive screen time, harmful content, and teen safety, and is now bringing similar tools to Threads, a platform with 500 million monthly users, three years after its July 2023 launch.
The parental supervision tools begin rolling out next week in the U.S. Meta plans to bring the controls to Threads globally by the end of the year, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Why it matters
Extending Family Center to Threads shows Meta standardizing child-safety infrastructure across its entire app portfolio rather than platform by platform, likely to remain a template as regulators keep pressing social platforms on teen protections.