Roblox announced today they have designed more safety tools to protect younger gamers, adding in more parental controls soon.
Child safety is crucial in online multiplayer games, especially against older gamers who might exploit them. Today, the Roblox Corporation announced today they will be implementing newly-designed tools to further protect its young audience in its sandbox game. These changes will include the ability for parents to remotely manage their child’s account, view their child’s friends list and limit the amount of time made available to play. Further improvements on this matter will be enacted in Roblox in the coming months, as detailed below.
More adjustments and tools to protect kids in Roblox in the next couple of months. Starting today, Roblox is also simplifying its content labels and limiting the games and experiences children under nine can see on the platform by default. Additionally, further changes will be made to stop children under 13 from directly messaging others outside of games, and limit interactions within games to public messages only.
It is both disheartening yet hopeful that this is the third set of changes detailed by Roblox in the past month. Previously-announced policy tweaks were revealed to now require parental access to be given for children to access some in-game chat features. This was followed by the announcement of a ban on social hangout experiences for kids under 13 due to “user behaviour that can potentially pose a risk.”
The company has been under scrutiny for not doing much to protect children’s safety, so this is a step in the right direction. A Bloomberg report revealed that Roblox itself had reported 13,316 instances of child exploitation in 2023, and that more than two dozen people had been arrested for abusing minors following contact in-game.
While the changes are coming in abundance now, it has been a question of why the company took so long to act. Games like Fortnite have and continue to face a similar issue as Roblox. It took the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to step in and examine what Epic Games was doing to protect their younger audiences. Also, Epic Games had a different issue with children easily making microtransactions accessible with their parents’ credit cards.
To answer the question of why it took Roblox a while to come up with enhanced safety tools, they included in today’s announcements that they conducted a lot of research into how they can make better safety improvements. They noted how they made “multiple rounds of internal research, including interviews, usability studies, international surveys with parents and children, and consultation with experts from child safety and media literacy organizations.” A Roblox spokesperson claimed these updates, announced today, had already been “praised by partners, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI).”
“We’ve spent nearly two decades building strong safety systems, but we know there’s always more to be done,” Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman said in a statement. “Last quarter saw a record average for daily active users on Roblox—over 88 million—and as our platform has grown in scale, we have always recognized that our approach to safety must evolve with it. Today’s launch represents the next stage in that evolution.”
