Roblox adding further parental controls, as its belated push to improve child safety continues
"We know there's always more to be done."
Roblox has today announced further tools designed to improve the safety of its young audience, including the ability for parents to remotely manage their child's account, view their child's friends list and limit the amount of time made available to play.
In the coming months, further changes will be made to stop children under 13 from directly messaging others outside of games, and limit interactions within games to public messages only. Starting today, Roblox is also simplifying its content labels and limiting the games and experiences children under nine can see on the platform by default.
Today's announcements mark yet a third set of changes detailed by Roblox in the past month. Previously-announced policy tweaks were revealed to now require parental access to be given for children to access some in-game chat features. This was followed by the announcement of a ban on social hangout experiences for kids under 13 due to "user behaviour that can potentially pose a risk".
Roblox has long been criticised for not doing enough to ensure the safety of its enormous audience, the majority of which are kids. This summer, a Bloomberg report revealed that Roblox itself had reported 13,316 instances of child exploitation in 2023, and that more than two dozen people had been arrested for abusing minors following contact in-game.
All of the above announced changes by Roblox follow the publication of a damning report last month that again highlighted examples of inappropriate - and allegedly, illegal - content being shared on the platform, and that also claimed Roblox had not been transparent around its user activity metrics (a claim Roblox said it "rejected").
Despite the recent flurry of changes, Roblox says today's announcements were decided upon and would be implemented following "multiple rounds of internal research, including interviews, usability studies, international surveys with parents and children, and consultation with experts from child safety and media literacy organisations".
A Roblox spokesperson claimed these updates, announced today, had already been "praised by partners, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI)".
"We've spent nearly two decades building strong safety systems, but we know there's always more to be done," Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman said in a statement. "Last quarter saw a record average for daily active users on Roblox - over 88 million - and as our platform has grown in scale, we have always recognised that our approach to safety must evolve with it. Today's launch represents the next stage in that evolution."
Last month, Roblox hit Dress To Impress removed a hotdog outfit after players used it to dress up like male genitalia.