- Facebook announced that Messenger Kids is now available in over 70 countries. And Facebook also added several new features to the app.
The Messenger Kids app is now available in more than 70 new countries. And three opt-in features were also added to the messaging app. The new features include supervised friending, the ability to connect kids through groups, and an option to help kids connect with more friends.
“Parental control is at the heart of Messenger Kids. Parents manage who their kids interact with and can monitor their child’s activity in the app through the Parent Dashboard, where they can also download their child’s information at any time. We know privacy and security are particularly important when it comes to kids online, and we take the responsibility to protect kids’ information seriously,” wrote Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety at Facebook in a blog post.
Supervised Friending
With the new Supervised Friending feature, parents can choose to allow their kids to accept, reject, and add or remove contacts while maintaining the ability to override any new contact approvals from the Parent dashboard. After a kid takes a friending action, parents can be notified through Messenger.
Connecting Kids Through Groups
Kids generally build community through their classes at school and participating in a team sport or other extracurricular activities. There is a new feature that gives parents the choice to approve a similar adult to help connect their child with other kids through a group in Messenger Kids. And these approved adults can only connect kids whose parents have also granted this adult the same approval.
Helping Kids Connect With More Friends
Parents in the US, Canada and Latin America can now decide whether to make their kid’s name and profile photo visible to friends of their kid’s contacts and their parents, kids of the parent’s Facebook friends, and kids of people parents invite to download the Messenger Kids app.
