YouTube is adding a Family Center hub along with a feature that allows parents to link their accounts to those of their teen children for insight on child use patterns. Linked parents will receive alerts with aggregated information about things like the number of new uploads, subscriptions and comments, or when a teen starts a live stream. What they won’t get are details about the content itself. YouTube calls it “a collaborative approach to teen supervision on YouTube.” The move comes as federal and state legislators get more aggressive about regulating online safety for minors. Continue reading YouTube Adds Family Center, Parent Insights on Teen Viewing

Snapchat is rolling out a new feature for its premium Snapchat+ platform that enables users who send Snaps to My AI let the artificial intelligence know what they’re up to “receive a unique generative Snap back that keeps the conversation going” via My AI Snaps. The feature was previewed at the Snap Partner Summit in April as part of a larger push on AI updates, including the ability to invite the My AI chatbot to participate in group chats with friends and the ability to get AI Lens suggestions and place recommendations. In addition, the My AI chatbot — made free to all users this year — was updated to reply to users’ Snaps with a text-based response. Continue reading Snapchat+ Introduces ‘My AI Snaps’ for Chatbot Snap Backs

Meta Platforms is beginning to implement parental controls on Instagram and Quest. Last week, Instagram added a Family Center that will eventually expand to allow parents and guardians to “help teens manage experiences across Meta technologies from one central place.” Meta says parental controls will be added to Quest VR in May, and hinted others, like Facebook, are queued-up to join. The Family Center will allow parents to monitor how much time their teens spend on Instagram, setting limits if they choose. Additionally, accounts teens follow and accounts following them will be trackable. Continue reading Meta Adding Parent Controls for Instagram and Virtual Reality