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The changes to the gaming platform include a new type of account that lets parents monitor their child’s on-platform friends and screen time.
Roblox, a video game platform popular among preteens, is introducing changes to its child-safety policy after widespread criticism following several incidents of alleged child abuse linked to its platform over the years.
The changes, which the game company intends to implement next month, include a new type of account that lets parents monitor their child’s activity, on-platform friends and daily screen time.
The game, which allows users to program and play their own games as well as other users’ games, will also reform the way it labels game content. Instead of labelling content by age appropriateness, the games will now be labelled based on what users can experience.
Children under 13 will require parental permission to access some chat features, while those under nine will require permission from their parents to access games labelled “moderate”, which may contain moderate violence or crude humour.
“Since day one, Roblox has been committed to building safety features and tools into the design of our products,” the company wrote in an email to parents outlining the changes.
“We will always continue to explore different ways to update our parental controls to make them even more useful for parents.”
Roblox, which has about 80m daily active users, has around 3,000 human moderators as well as AI technology that the company says scan all user content, including audio and text. TikTok, in comparison, has around 40,000 moderators, with three times that number of daily users.
The game has been accused of platforming child-abusers for years. Since 2018, US police have arrested at least 24 people accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed on the platform, according to Bloomberg.
While just days ago, it was reported that a Florida woman allegedly used Roblox to instruct a 10-year-old child to kill a two-month-old baby.
Hindenburg Research, an investment research firm, recently claimed Roblox’s games expose children to grooming, pornography and violent content.
“We found Roblox to be an X-rated paedophile hellscape, replete with … groups openly trading child pornography, widely accessible sex games, violent content and extremely abusive speech – all of which is open to young children,” said the company.
The company also accused Roblox of lying to its investors and advertisers by inflating the number of “people” on its platform.
However, Roblox refuted Hindenburg’s claims, calling them “misleading”.
“Every day, tens of millions of users of all ages have safe and positive experiences on Roblox,” the company said, adding “the financial claims made by Hindenburg are misleading” and alleging that the authors of the Hindenburg report have their own agenda.
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