Will this Roblox change finally protect young gamers?

Published: October 28, 2024

Will this Roblox change finally protect young gamers?

By Movieguide® Contributor

Roblox appears to be taking significant steps to make its site safer for young users by overhauling parental controls on accounts for people under the age of 13.

This revision will introduce a new “parental account” from which parents can manage the settings of their children’s accounts. They will have control over certain chat features and whether their children can access ‘moderate’ content – that is, content that contains violence or crude humor. The parent accounts also receive updates on their children’s daily playtime and who they are friends with on the platform.

With this update, Roblox removes the previous system of using a fixed PIN to change controls. However, any changes previously made under the old system remain in effect. Additionally, users’ settings automatically change once they reach a certain age (9 and 13 are thresholds on the site).

These changes to parental controls come after years of Roblox coming under fire for the content young users can access. The National Center for Sexual Exploitation has been around for a long time mentioned the game in the “Dirty Dozen” list for the sexually explicit content present on the site.

“A new report describes Roblox as ‘a pedophile hell for children.’ Researchers easily identified 38 Roblox groups – one with as many as 103,000 members – that openly trade child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and solicit sexual acts from minors,” according to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). reported earlier in October.

“Usernames like ‘@igruum_minors’ (I groom minors) and ‘@RavpeTinyK1dsJE’ (rape of small children) are common, with more than 900 variants using abuser Jeffrey Epstein alone and multiple variants using Earl Brian Bradley, who was indicted on 471 counts of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children,” the report said continued.

In addition to the sexual content, the platform has also exposed millions of children to gambling, raking in millions of dollars in profits from this activity.

“The three virtual casinos launched widespread marketing campaigns, prominent Roblox social media influencers discussed or endorsed the virtual casinos, and Bloxflip had more than 5.7 million visitors per month in 2022,” said U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria. wrote in a statement. “(It is reasonable to conclude that) Roblox knew how these virtual casinos operated and could have anticipated the likelihood that minors would navigate to these sites and gamble their Robux.”

Roblox still has a long way to go when it comes to child safety; hopefully this upcoming change will be the first of many that genuinely tries to protect its young users.