It’s about time that Roblox added some protection measures for children to the app. Yesterday, they finally reported that they are adding new child safety measures after years of Roblox being free-to-play and available to an audience of any age. This has meant that young children are interacting with grown adults in an unmonitored space, and this has led to a lot of concern over the years from parents and governments alike. To ensure that pre-teens are safe while playing Roblox, users who are under the age of 13 will need permission from their parents or caregivers to access certain chat features. Additionally, those under the age of 9 will also need parental permission to be able to access experiences that have a content maturity label of “Moderate,” which has the potential to contain violence or crude humor.
Before this happened, Roblox was banned in Turkiye for the potential risk to children. Bloomberg reported on this in July, saying that Roblox had sent over 13,000 reports to the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children in 2023. Whether this will now mean that the app gets unbanned in Turkiye remains to be seen.
Roblox sent out an email to users saying, “To continue receiving notifications about your child’s account related to spending or other important activity, you’ll need to set up a Roblox account with parent privileges and link to your child’s account.” Having this ruleset in place means that parents will be able to see if they are accessing content that is inappropriate for their age group. Whether it means that the parents will be able to monitor conversations or chat is uncertain at this point in time, but if not, something needs to be done to ensure that children are having safe interactions on the Internet, more than being taught ‘Stranger Danger’ in schools and home. The email also goes on to say, “When these changes take effect, your child will receive a notification inviting them to add a linked parent account, and we’ll send you an email with instructions.”
While this is a monumental change for the platform, it should be noted that for the last 18 years of the platform’s existence, there has been no protection in place for pre-teens and children, especially from engaging in chat with strangers. It’s very well known that Roblox has been used to organize pedophile meetings and use the platform to groom children.
It’s about time that Roblox has taken action on this front, and we can only hope that these rules help protect the innocent on the application.
