Will This Roblox Change Finally Protect Young Gamers?
By Movieguide® Contributor
Roblox appears to be taking significant steps towards making its site safer for young users by overhauling its parental controls on accounts for those under the age of 13.
This overhaul will introduce a new “parental account” from which parents will control the settings of their children’s accounts. They will have control over certain chat features and whether their kids can access “moderate” content — that is content that includes violence or crude humor. The parental accounts will also receive updates about their children’s daily playtime and who they are friends with on the platform.
With this update, Roblox will remove the previous system of using a set PIN to change controls. However, any changes previously made under the old system will remain in place. Additionally, users’ settings will automatically change once they reach certain ages – 9 and 13 being thresholds on the site.
These changes in parental controls come after Roblox has come under fire for years for the content it allows young users to access. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation has long named the game in its “Dirty Dozen” list for the sexually explicit content that is rampant on the site.
READ MORE: REPORT: ROBLOX USERS ADVERTISE VIRTUAL STRIP CLUB AND EXPLICIT CONTENT TO MINORS
“A new report describes Roblox as ‘a pedophile hellscape for kids.’ Researchers easily identified 38 Roblox groups — one with as many as 103,000 members — openly trading child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and soliciting sexual acts from minors,” the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) reported earlier this October.
“User names like ‘@igruum_minors’ [I groom minors], and ‘@RavpeTinyK1dsJE’ [rape tiny kids] are common, with 900+ variations alone of abuser Jeffrey Epstein and multiple variations using Earl Brian Bradley, who was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping, and exploiting 103 children,” the report continued.
Beyond the sexual content, the platform has also exposed millions of kids to gambling, raking in millions of dollars in profit from this activity.
“The three virtual casinos launched widespread marketing campaigns, prominent Roblox social media influencers discussed or endorsed the virtual casinos, and Bloxflip had over 5.7 million monthly visitors in 2022,” U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote in a ruling. “[It is reasonable to infer that] Roblox knew how these virtual casinos operated and could foresee the probability that minors would navigate to these sites and gamble their Robux away.”
Roblox still has a very long way to go in terms of child safety; hopefully, this upcoming change will be the first of many to genuinely attempt to protect its young users.
READ MORE: DOES ROBLOX EXPLOIT YOUNG DEVELOPERS?
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