Source: Roblox
Roblox has announced a variety of safety features for children within the platform.
In a post on the official Roblox website, Matt Kaufman, the Chief Safety Officer for the platform, has announced a slew of major updates that will address Roblox’s current issue regarding child safety and parental controls.
The significant updates will include built-in protections for the platform’s youngest users, with tools that parents and caregivers can use to monitor and access their children’s accounts from the comfort of their own devices through remote management. This means that parents will no longer need to access parental controls through their children’s account.
Parents who wish to be more involved in monitoring their child’s activity will only need to link their Roblox accounts together, on top of verifying themselves using an ID or credit card. After doing so, parents will be able to monitor their child’s friends list and screen-time, as well as set daily screen-time limits that when reached, will lock out children from accessing Roblox until the next day.
Roblox is also adjusting its built-in limits regarding in-game chats, effectively prohibiting children under the age of 13 to message other users outside of platform chat within games or experiences. In addition to this feature, Roblox is introducing a built-in setting that will limit children under the age of 13 to use public broadcast messages only within a game or experience, meaning that the child will not be able to directly message other users.
Content Maturity Limits have also been revamped, meaning Roblox games and experiences will now be labelled based on the type of content users can expect instead of limiting through age ranges. The content labels will be: Minimal, Mild, Moderate, and Restricted, with users under the age of 9 only being able to access Minimal and Mild by default, and only being able to access Moderate content with parental consent. Additionally, certain games or experiences that offer socialisation outside of a user’s friends list will be age-gated to ensure the safety of children from contact with strangers.
Roblox has been the centre of controversy in the past few months, since a Bloomberg report released earlier in July exposed the prevalence of child predators lurking within the platform. This fire was further fuelled by a Hindenburg Research report claiming that Roblox inflated its key metrics for Wall Street, and was a “pedophile hellscape” for kids.
However, with these newly implemented safety protocols, Roblox is aiming to make the platform the “safest” and “most civil” online platform possible.
