In response to criticism, "Snapchat" announces a feature for parental control

 Snapchat has launched a new feature that enables parents to censor content that reaches their teens. The new feature was called “family center” or “family center”, and it allows parents to know the friends of their teenage children on the application, in addition to the people with whom they exchanged messages over the course of a week, but it does not allow them to see the content of those conversations, in order to give parents better insights to help In protecting their children in ways that do not compromise the privacy of the teenager.

The new feature is activated as soon as parents invite their children to the new Family Center within the app, and the recipient has the option to accept or decline the invitation. Regarding the secret behind the launch of the “Snapchat” application, its first parental control tool, social media expert, Mohamed Adel, said that it came “down to the sharp criticism of Snapchat, which reached cases against the company, claiming that adolescents on the platform were exposed to content that harms their health.” psychological and mental, to the point of suicide of some users.

In his speech to "Sky News Arabia", Adel added, "The intensification of criticism against the company affects its reputation and then loses over time more users, which affects the volume of investments, and consequently the profits that the company targets, in addition to the direct impact that It causes Snapchat to pay huge damages if it loses these cases.”

That's why Snap plans to launch new parental control features in the coming months, including notifications for parents when teens report abuse from a user, according to Reuters. But these features "will not greatly affect the psychological and mental health of adolescents", according to social media expert Adel, who believes that they came "to save the face of the social media application, no more and no less."

And he indicated that "the application is largely directed at young people, while the elderly are not good at dealing with it, and therefore it was necessary for parental control tools to be preceded by educational materials for adults in how to deal with and interact with it."

What the expert indicates, an opinion poll showed last October, concluded that Snapchat is the preferred platform among teens in the United States, and its popularity continues to increase. Snapchat was not the first to launch parental control features, as other applications preceded it in recent years. Facebook, the owner of the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram applications, launched similar tools, after it was criticized for its impact. On the psychological and mental health of adolescents.

It is worth noting that at the end of last year, the US Congress launched a series of investigations with "YouTube", "Tik Tok" and "Snapchat" regarding the policy of protecting children, as it confronted them with evidence that the actors on those platforms were being bullied. These investigations had a direct impact on Snap Inc., which cost it a loss of $422 million in its second-quarter earnings report, which pushed its share price to decline by 39.2 percent at the close.