Today’s news that Roblox is adding new child safety measures to the phenomenally popular game platform is certainly good to hear, but the nature of these scant changes reveals just how careless and callous the app has been for so many years, and how it continues to offer almost no protections for children.
Bloomberg reports that Roblox Corp will be bringing in new reforms in November of 2024 that introduce new parental controls requiring permission to let under-13s access chat features, and prevent access for children under nine to specific games on the Roblox platform. Which, yes, very immediately raises the question, “Wait, Roblox didn’t already do that?”
Read More: Report On Roblox Describes It As ‘A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids’
The new plans, sent in an email to parents of children with Roblox accounts, come weeks after an investigation by research investment company Hindenburg that called the platform, with ample evidence, “a pedophile hellscape for kids.”
What this of course reveals (or confirms) is that for the last 18 years, Roblox has offered no way to prevent pre-teen children from accessing chat with complete strangers. Strangers who, as the Hindenburg report demonstrated, can sometimes be organized groups of pedophiles using Roblox to get access to children.
It also shows that Roblox has previously not seen an issue with allowing children under nine years old from being able to play games with “moderate violence or crude humor.”
For further context, it was in September of this year that Roblox Corp. decided that after nearly two decades, it might not be a good idea to allow under-fives to create their own Roblox accounts without supervision.
Since children under five are still building the cognitive skills and coordination needed to fully enjoy Roblox, you will no longer see birthday options for children younger than five when setting up an account on Roblox.
Bloomberg’s own report in July described the dangers to which Roblox was exposing its child audience, following up on reports from 2021 by People Make Games.
There are no restrictions when creating an account
So yes, thank goodness that a sliver of the 80 million daily players of Roblox will now have the most cursory protections in place. But it’s worth noting they’re close to useless, given there is nothing in place to prevent a child creating a 13+ account. In fact, it’s simpler not to.
To create a brand new Roblox account, you go to the website, click “Sign Up,” then fill in a username, password, and a date of birth. You can pick 1925 from the drop-down menu, and then with a click on “Sign Up” below, that’s it. Seriously.
There are no checks whatsoever, no email or phone number required, no verification options—it just hands you an account for a 99-year-old, with full access to all chat features. (It took maybe five clicks from having no account to being able to play Blood & Gore.) To get voice chat, you need a phone number for a verification code, but this can come to WhatsApp so it’s easily subverted. For content marked 17+, you do need to verify your age with documentation, but clearly there’s a vast amount of content without that rating that doesn’t seem at all suitable for children.
So these new features, while welcome, do nothing to prevent kids who have the sense to just scroll down and pick an earlier year of birth. Nor indeed do they help children whose parents have no interest in or awareness of parental controls. And they continue to allow anyone over the age of nine to play games that, under any other circumstances, would have teenage ratings.
Updated: 10/24/2024, 1:17 p.m. ET: Updated to include the detail that content rated 17+ requires verification.
