Roblox says it will be introducing some new safety features for children’s accounts next month after a shocking report claimed that the platform was rife with child sexual exploitation.
According to IGN, Roblox sent an email to parents of children with accounts explaining the changes. Firstly, parents can now link their accounts to their children’s accounts, which they can then use to monitor their children’s usage and their friends, along with updating parental control tools.
Prior to this change in parental privileges, parents could lock a child’s account behind a PIN code to prevent the child from accessing it. There will no longer be avatars, and parents will need to create their own accounts, but this new separation will make it harder for minors to change settings on their own.
Roblox is also making changes to default settings for different children’s accounts. Users under the age of 13 will need a parent’s permission to access certain chat features, while users under the age of 9 will need permission to access any content rated “medium” and above. This may align with the new Party feature that allows people in friend groups to chat via text or voice messages, but only for users aged 13 and above.
“Since day one, Roblox has been committed to building safety features and tools into our product design. We will always explore different ways to update our parental control tools to make them more useful for parents.”
An analysis conducted by Hindenburg Research earlier this month claimed that the free-to-play Roblox game not only inflated user statistics and engagement numbers by disregarding bots or secondary accounts, but also discussed mistreatment of children on the platform.
The report stated that “Roblox is jeopardizing children’s safety in order to inform investors of growth.” “In addition to inflated user metrics, our in-game research revealed a hellish scene of child sexual exploitation, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content, and extremely offensive speech.”
Roblox refuted these allegations, stating that the report was “misleading” and that they take “any content or behavior on the platform that does not adhere to its standards seriously.” This despite other reports over the past two years, including a Bloomberg report interviewing Roblox employees who claimed the platform has an issue with child safety, and certain lawsuits.
