In April 2026 the Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard rated 16 apps against six categories on a 1 to 4 scale. This week it has been rebuilt. Four new platforms now sit on the scorecard. A seventh category, bullying, has been added. And for every platform on the page, we now publish our own recommended age, based on the evidence, alongside the platform’s own stated minimum.
The shortest summary: if Australia thought a platform was unsafe enough to ban for under-16s, parents can now look it up on the scorecard. If a platform claims it is suitable for a 13-year-old but the evidence says otherwise, the scorecard says so plainly.
Four new platforms
The four additions are Reddit, Threads, Twitch, and Kick. All four appear on Australia’s banned-for-under-16s list, which came into effect in December 2025. None of them had been mainstream parent-safety territory until recently. All four are now widely used by UK teens.
Reddit is rated 17+ in the Apple App Store, higher than TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office fined Reddit £14.47 million in February 2026 for unlawfully processing under-13s’ data, the largest children’s privacy penalty the regulator has ever issued. There are no built-in parental controls. Direct messages are on by default for every account.
Threads sits inside Meta’s ecosystem and benefits from Instagram’s safety rules, but with weaker protections than Instagram itself. From November 2025, Instagram’s Family Center supervision no longer extends to Threads. Meta’s May 2026 consolidated Family Center, announced last week, covers Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Meta Horizon, but pointedly not Threads.
Twitch publishes more transparency data than most platforms but has a long, documented predator problem. Bloomberg’s 2022 investigation found a 1,125 per cent increase in NCMEC reports about Twitch between 2019 and 2021. There are no built-in parental controls.
Kick is the lowest-rated platform on the entire scorecard. Owned by the same parent company as the crypto-gambling site Stake.com, gambling streams are its number-one content category. In August 2025 a French streamer died on Kick during a 280-hour livestreamed broadcast that allegedly involved physical abuse. The French government has filed criminal proceedings against Kick. The platform publishes no transparency reports.
A new category: bullying
The original six categories cover the structural risks of each platform: what content gets through, who can contact your child, how their data is handled, what controls parents can use. They do not directly capture peer-on-peer harm, which is the risk most UK parents actually see in their own homes.
Bullying is the seventh category. Every social and gaming platform on the scorecard now has a bullying score and a note explaining where the risks sit. The AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Character.ai, Snapchat My AI) do not have a bullying score because they do not have peer contact.
Snapchat, X, and Kick are rated severe risk on bullying. Snapchat’s disappearing messages enable bullying without trace, leaving victims no evidence. X’s Trust and Safety dismantlement means mass pile-ons go unchecked. Kick has no published Youth Safety enforcement data at all.
WhatsApp is rated high risk on bullying despite being one of the safest platforms structurally. Group chats are where most teen bullying happens, and end-to-end encryption means parents cannot see the content.
Our own recommended age, not the platforms’
The third change is editorial. Every platform on the scorecard now shows two ages on its card: the platform’s own stated minimum (usually 13, set by US privacy law rather than by safety), and the Wired Parents recommended age, derived from our scorecard methodology.
The gap is sometimes wide. Reddit’s stated minimum is 13. Our recommendation is 18+. Kick’s stated minimum is 13 (16 in the EU). Our recommendation is also 18+. Instagram’s stated minimum is 13. Our recommendation is 16+, which aligns with Australia’s regulatory bar.
The full table of recommendations runs from Minecraft at 7+ to Kick, Reddit, X, and Character.ai at 18+. Every recommendation has reasoning behind it on the platform’s card.
What this means for you right now
Three things to do.
First, visit the scorecard and check each app your child uses. The recommended ages on the cards are derived from the same evidence parents have been asking us to weigh up for them. The number is on the card; the reasoning is in the notes.
Second, if your child uses Reddit, Twitch, or Kick, know that no parental controls exist. Account-level settings on these platforms can be reversed by the child. Oversight depends on the conversation you have, not on the tools you install.
Third, on the platforms where parental controls do exist (Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Discord, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp), set them up. From May 2026, Instagram lets parents see the topics shaping their teen’s algorithm. YouTube lets parents set the Shorts feed to zero. Family Center for Meta apps is now consolidated. The tools have improved meaningfully in the past year. The bottleneck is not the tools. It is parents knowing the tools exist.
The relaunched scorecard is live now. As always, ratings will evolve as platforms change.
Sources: Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard
eSafety Commissioner — age-restricted social media platforms
ICO — Reddit £14.47m fine, 24 February 2026
