Roblox says it’s instituting some new safety features for children accounts next month after a shocking report claimed the platform was filled with child and sexual exploitation.
According to IGN, Roblox sent an email out to the parents of kids with accounts explaining the changes. First up, parents can link up their accounts with a child’s, which they can then use to view their kid’s usage and their friends, along with update parental controls.
Before this change to parent privileges, parents could lock a child’s account behind a PIN that (hopefully) the child couldn’t access. There will no longer be PINs, and parents will have to make their own accounts, but this new separation will make it tougher for minors to change settings on their own.
Roblox is also making changes to default settings for different children accounts. Users under the age of 13 will need a parent’s permission to access certain chat features, while those under 9 years old will need permission to access any content with a rating of “Moderate” and above. This might go along with the new Party feature that lets people in friend groups chat via text or voice, but only for users 13 and over.
“Since day one, Roblox has been committed to building safety features and tools into the design of our products. We will always continue to explore different ways to update our parental controls to make them even more useful for parents,” the email reads.
Analysis from Hindenburg Research, which released earlier this month, claimed that not only had the free-to-play Roblox inflated its daily active user stats and engagement numbers by not taking into account bots or secondary accounts but also discussed abuse toward children on the platform.
“Roblox is compromising child safety in order to report growth to investors,” the report reads. “Beyond inflated key user metrics, our in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.”
Roblox refuted the claims, saying that the ones in the report were “misleading” and that it takes “any content or behavior on the platform that doesn’t abide by its standards extremely seriously.” This is despite other reports over the past couple of years, including one in Bloomberg that interviewed Roblox workers who said the platform had a child safety problem, and some lawsuits.
