The Roblox Corporation announced Monday that it’s implementing new features for users younger than 13 years old following increased criticism and scrutiny concerning how it protects minors on the platform.
The company wrote in a blog post detailing the changes that it takes the safety of minors “extremely seriously.”
“We are fundamentally a platform for play, which differs from other places on the internet, where the focus is on browsing or consuming content. Since the day we launched, we’ve had a growing population of younger users and we want to help keep them safe on Roblox,” the post reads.
First up, the new Content Labels system will label experiences by content rather than by age, which specifically allows it to severely limit what users younger than 9 years old can access. There are four labels — Minimal, Mild, Moderate, and Restricted — and those accounts can now only access the first two categories by default, although they can play in others with parental consent.
Many people had previously criticized Roblox‘s open chat, but now users younger than 13 years old will no longer be able to message users outside of experiences. They also will be limited to public broadcast messages and won’t be able to directly message others. Roblox is also working on limiting what experiences they can access.
It also confirmed an IGN report from October that it was expanding parental controls, allowing parents or guardians to remotely access those features from their own devices. They can also now set daily screentime limits in the app, view their child’s friend list, and limit their spending.
Roblox has been criticized in the past for its lack of comprehensive protections for children and teenagers on the platform. A recent Bloomberg report interviewed former and current Roblox workers, along with users and experts, who claimed there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of moderation and protecting younger players. The workers criticized the default open chat function, its free-to-play nature that makes it easy to sign up, and that it didn’t mention “grooming” at all in its moderation guide.
There was also the matter of a recent Hindenburg Research analysis that said Roblox was “compromising child safety in order to report growth to investors” with a “pedophile hellscape” of hateful speech, pornography, and more.
“Safety on Roblox is at the core of everything we do,” the Roblox content moderation guide reads. Chief safety officer Matt Kaufman echoed that sentiment in an interview with Bloomberg. “Tens of millions of people of all ages have a safe and positive experience on Roblox every single day,” he said.
