After a wave of reports condemning the child-targeted sandbox platform, Roblox is implementing notable changes about accessibility of experiences to minors. Outlined in the Creator Hub, the major changes in place now are age restrictions for Social Hangouts and Free-form User Creation spaces, and availability of unrated experiences will change in early December.
Social Hangout spaces will be restricted to players 13 years old and above, as will Free-form User Creation. Interestingly, it doesn’t include experiences such as “roleplaying” or “real-life simulation” spaces (with examples that Roblox gives being “teacher, police officer, race car driver”), which also have chat capabilities, nor does it include areas with pre-moderated Roblox 3D objects.
As of December 3, players under 13 will not be able to search for nor play unrated games. They’ll be able to click a link to see, but the experience won’t launch for these players. Roblox will also ensure that games’ discovery pages are appropriate for all ages, regardless of rating, with enforcement starting next year.
Judging from the actual post announcing the changes where self-identified “<13” users are upset they’re finding it harder to communicate, Roblox will also continue to permit users under 13 to post on the forums. Plus, the methods of implementing parental controls are easy to work around, with zero verification necessary.
This wave of moderation failure awareness began with a Bloomberg Businessweek report, which outlined in great detail how pedophiles were able to goad young users from Roblox onto other platforms. It unveiled that a 2022 moderation guide had no advice on how to recognize grooming behavior from adults. In one case, a 15-year-old ran away with a 22-year-old Roblox developer who recruited a small army of children designing new characters for Robux.
The latest and most damning accusations come from the Hindenberg Research group, whose researchers went into the game itself and found damning first-hand “moderation failures.”
A former Senior Designer told the researchers that Roblox’s moderation measures were poor already in order to increase metrics, though they only grew more careless once the company went public in 2021. (As a slight aside: As the report is basically a dossier for the finance industry, it unveils a lot of other interesting details. For instance, Roblox lied to the SEC about being able to track alts.)
This report more directly condemned the lack of real moderation tools and the poor default features, which the new changes seem to address. For instance, an account for a child under nine years old had text chat visibility set to “Everyone” by default, and players could loophole around parental control locks in several ways.
Earlier this year, Roblox touted a goal of a billion active users, which seems to be a bigger priority at this point than actual moderation changes. Plus, in a controversial interview this April, the Roblox Studio lead touted the near-30% of income it hands child developers, saying, “I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life.”
