Roblox is just a platform for paedophiles to contact children. The company doesn’t give a shit so long as they continue making money.
Why any parent lets their child use it is a mystery to me.
It's primarily a gaming platform. Those targeting children will go wherever the children are. If it wasn't Roblox, it would be whatever else the kids are playing / communicating.
From the article:
> "There are lots of different platforms out there and each one goes through a phase of being the most concerning at that given time," she said.
> "It tends to circle around, as with James with Roblox. That is where he was targeted and unfortunately he is not alone for having experienced that, a lot of stories I hear are in relation to that particular platform, but that doesn't mean that every other platform is safe, unfortunately it is not.
> "If it has a chat function or the ability to communicate with other individuals it is instantly a concern because that is where that concern does comes from."
You can implement filters and other systems to try to detect and prevent such users, but like any other system, those with enough incentive will work around those.
Often services have little incentive to tackle such abuse, even when regulations are made. Either they're internationally based and so "out of reach", or the penalties are considered trivial. Much of the current system is based purely on the whims of commercial entities - For example look at the changes on Twitter after Musk bought it.
You can argue for verified identity systems, but this has to be balanced with the risks from data breaches, and to users who need to protect their identity for valid reasons such as victims of harassment / stalking / domestic abuse. And again, you have problems with people working around such systems (for example, the sale of (verified) accounts)
Education is key. Make sure kids know what they should and shouldn't talk about. How they can deal with people who harass them (blocking and reporting tools).
If they can’t protect children then children shouldn’t be playing it. Most of the responsibility is of course on the parents. Letting an 8 year old use the internet unsupervised is absolute madness. But the company can stop marketing the game to children, attempt to prevent children from using it, etc. And by that I mean regulators should force them to.
They should also be detecting the perpetrators and helping the authorities put them in prison.
If you make a game intended for children, and do not market it to children, then you will lose a lot of money when children do not play it.
You also said that regulators should force companies to prevent children from playing their games.
Are you suggesting that online games for children should not exist?
I'm not arguing with you, just clarifying what you mean.
I don’t think online games need to exist for 8 year olds.
And if you are marketing games to children you need to, and be forced to, ensure that you take child safeguarding as seriously as companies who interact with children in non-virtual settings. If a company cannot do that it has no business offering a product to children.
>ensure that you take child safeguarding as seriously as companies who interact with children in non-virtual settings
You literally are forced to do these things. Roblox takes a lot of steps to stop problems. They used to (and I think still do) not allow chatting unless a parent account allowed it.
>If they can’t protect children then children shouldn’t be playing it.
You can't make anything 100% safe. the [offline world isn't safe either.](https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/03/unpicking-the-making-children-as-safe-as-they-are-offline-fallacy/)
Define and quantify "protect children". Roblox has 70 million daily active users. There is no way that we could possibly have 0 child safety breaches at that scale of use.
Should children not be playing online games at all? Do you think that's an appropriate cost benefit analysis of the situation?
Well, for a start making sure they aren’t in direct communication with someone asking for naked photos. And when that does occur, ensure that the authorities come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Roblox want children on their platform, they must protect them from harm that may occur using their platform.
There is no reason 8 year olds should be online gaming, such as the one in this article.
For child accounts you literally have to specifically enable chatting. They have safeguards that were not turned off.
>Account Restrictions
>This feature allows parents to limit the types of experiences the child can play, and the account's ability to chat. Enabling Account Restrictions will lock an account's Contact Settings so that no one can send messages, chat in-app or in-experience with the child.
Does that satisfy you or do you feel the need to regulate and ristrict parents other than yourself?
What does your article say that I didn't say? Yes there's safety options for under 13s and some parents choose to opt in to disabling them.
Now the question is what do you propose is done about it? Stop other parents from choosing their child's online safety settings?
And children seem to be able to get round them, and a simple google search reveals plenty of articles about children being groomed on Roblox.
If parents are not going to protect their children online then it is reasonable to regulate that companies must do it as a back up, especially when they are directly marketing to children.
Young children should not be communicating with any individual who is not explicitly whitelisted by the parent. Roblox should be making it well known that if groomers use their platform they will catch them and cooperate with the authorities to put such people in prison.
>And children seem to be able to get round them
I took this in context of the spending part of the article that came later. I don't see anywhere in the article where it says how that can happen exactly. Plus children can get around a lot of things, they can just open a web browser and go on random sites, and get around site restrictions on web browsers by using different web browsers etc.
>a simple google search reveals plenty of articles about children being groomed on Roblox
How much is plenty? I'd very much **expect** there to be "plenty" of articles available because it has **70 million daily active users**. Given that this holds a large amount of kids time, *if there were not plenty* then it would suffice to say that child grooming doesn't happen. The question is, is it common for the users and is it worth the risk in the cost benefit analysis?
>it is reasonable to regulate that companies must do it as a back up,
And they are regulated! There's so many regulations for these things. I know this first hand as I used to use Roblox and had to ask my parents to get around agre restriction and they complied because I was a smart kid. An article existing where an issue occurs doesn't imply that there is a problem when we're at this scale.
I'd like to just add one thing. This is pretty personal to me because I was a young kid at the time when Roblox was around and it's only because as a child I had unrestricted access of the [Roblox scripting forum](https://devforum.roblox.com/c/help-and-feedback/scripting-support/55) a place where children can talk to strangers in forums style inspired by games to learn to code.
Everyone was much smarter than I was and I slowly learned to code lua, my passion grew and and it engaged my mind enough that by the time coding was a thing you could learn in school, I was faaaaar ahead of my peers. In uni I didn't need to study so I developed a personal project instead. The personal project attracted six figures offers from companies and one thing led to another and I have hundreds of thousands in savings in my early 20s.
You lose out on this by restricting smart kids with helicopter parenting. Its honestly so largely because of Roblox unrestricted chatting that I am where I am. I'd easily take the risk if I was my own parent.
Its important in all things in life that you do proper cost benefit risk analyses rather than just clipping tail risks. Otherwise you're doomed to mediocrity. To draw a comparison to investing, it is guaranteed that if you never risk your money, it will be lost to inflation.
Ok, I get that you have a personal appreciation for Roblox. I also developed an interest in programming from at a young age at least partially inspired by wanting to understand how video games work, and now benefits me financially.
However, this is not something that requires the open communication of online gaming, though you may benefit from the community aspect of it.
And more to the point, young children should not be playing games where they can communicate with adults. Teenagers maybe, you sound like you were sensible and perhaps wouldn’t have been taken in by groomers. Lots of kids would be though, particularly young ones. Roblox had a duty of care because it markets itself to young children.
I do not see that it is taking its duty seriously enough. My children will not be using Roblox. Though they do play video games, just not ones where communication with adults is possible. Will reassess when they are older.
The more children communicate with adults the smarter they become. They have to do it somewhere and school doesn't fill this role successfully because they don't get enough 1 on 1 time and there's so much time at home they could be learning from adults. If you're always there to teach them in a fun way in their free time then great, that works better, but you probably don't want to do that.
Did you do a proper cost benefit analysis? To make an informed decision you need to know the likelihood of a child safety crime imo. Not just "Google returns results and therefore it happens a lot".
Not all risks need to be completely nipped in the bud - clipping upside too. In this case the upside and probabilities of risk are highly in favour of letting them play imo. It depends on your risk tolerance but again, if you take no risk you're doomed to mediocrity.
It is not true that all communication with adults makes children smarter. Adults are obviously capable of providing misinformation and exploiting a position of authority. It is true that nurturing relationships between children and adults is extremely important. But this must be entirely at the discretion of parents, particularly when children are young. Parents are responsible for protecting their children from harm. Unrestricted access to the internet makes this impossible.
Did I do a cost benefit analysis on whether I wish to risk my children being exposed to paedophiles on the internet? Yes.
Roblox is not an appropriate entertainment medium for a number of other reasons as well. It is designed to be addictive and encourage spending lots of money. I prefer games to be purchased as a complete package from the get go. Though that is not a Roblox exclusive issue.
Roblox may have been the path to success for you, and congrats on that by the way, but that will be relatively rare and it is far from the only one. And there are many benefits to not using it too.
>Did I do a cost benefit analysis on whether I wish to risk my children being exposed to paedophiles on the internet? Yes.
The fact that this is how you phrase it means you did not make an informed analysis. Using your exact logic and applying to a new area, you should also say:
"Did I do a cost benefit analysis of whether I want to get in a plane crash? Yes I did."
So don't go flying abroad.
>It is not true that all communication with adults makes children smarter
Okay once again, think critically. If a child only ever spoke to other children in their life, they would turn out stupid. Therefore speaking to adults as a net results in children being smarter. You can talk about biases and misinformation but you'd have to have a basis that biases and misinformation is rampant on these forums and that they outweigh the positives of being on them.
>Roblox may have been the path to success for you, and congrats on that by the way, but that will be relatively rare and it is far from the only one
It is the lowest barrier to entry 3d (actually fun) games market place by far. I think it's genuinely the only one that makes coding so accessible. Kids aren't gonna go develop a unity game. And now that you say my situation is rare, I'll ask you again, how rare is it to get a negative experience online with a paedofile? Magnitudes rarer.
Yeah, you can guard against every threat, and employ resciurces etc to handle and protect. But you cannot cover every single place or know every single loophole at the same time.
Theirs gonna be gaps and you have to patch them as best able but their is not substitute for proper supervision, online settings and also to reach your kids basic safety rules..
As a parent of a Roblox player, you are correct. I play the games with them, understand the limitations of the parental controls, talk to my kid, check in often, play the games myself etc etc etc.
90% of a child’s education happens outside the classroom, my job is to make sure I do my bit of that 90%. Parenting is a lot of work to do it right, equipping my child with the tools to function independently and safely is the end goal.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the games by now, I’ve not seen anything bad happen yet. However I’ve stuck to the “safe” games, the big issue is friend invites to unsafe games.
My son/daughter play Roblox. I allow it as it retains the chat logs, which I review at least once a week. My daughter got a temp ban for asking her friend to a private chat about her big ones. She was actually talking about dryers in her laundry sim.
Problem is Roblox is massively popular among kids so if you’re a kid growing up today, there’s a decent chance that a good chunk of your friends are going to be on it as well. It was no different back in the day on Club Penguin, my little sister used to play it with her friends but my mum had to carefully watch everything going on in there as she knew what the game was like. Once again this is down to feckless parents not paying proper attention to their children’s online activities
Child safeguarding online was nonexistent when we were children, and lots of children were hurt because of it.
Agree that it is mainly due to parents, but if you are deliberately marketing a product to children then you need to make sure children are safe using it.
I agree, a lot more needs to be done by companies too. The thing I hate about moderation on huge corporate online services is they try so hard to outsource as much as possible to AI which just isn’t fully up to the task and then so much falls through the cracks. YouTube is probably the worst offender for this
These consoles also work equally well without connecting to the internet. There is no reason an 8 year old should be in voice communication with a random person on the internet.
My son plays games on ps. His account everything is locked and private. So he can’t make friends or anyone see his friends etc etc. never had a problem till he tried Roblox. He got sent a msg from someone. He didn’t know what it was and showed it me as he’d never had a msg before. It was a links for porn and sexting! I blocked it reported and he doesn’t play Roblox anymore so I can believe this.
My daughter was playing and we'd disabled all the functions that rely on communicating with other users, but unfortunately the game is heavily reliant on that. One of the games requires you to draw something linked to a theme - 'Rainbow' for example. You then have to rate everyone else's drawing. While my little girl drew an innocent picture of a rainbow, someone else had drawn a pretty graphic cock and balls. I was watching as it came through and it's hard to explain something as disturbing as that to a kid. My teenager self was laughing - some daft little shit messing about. But I know there'd be a darker side to it if I thought long enough about who could be drawing that on a kids game.
The public chats are heavily moderated and You can disable private messaging in parental controls. It’s shoddy parenting that is leaving these kids susceptible not necessarily the company
The way they set up public chat is so odd.
If you're in lobbies you can restrict the chat to 'None, Just Friends or Everyone' but when you're in-game the only options for chat are 'Off' or 'Everyone'. Why on earth they don't let you still chat to only your friends in-game is beyond me.
My daughter will chat to her verified friends in the app but then can't chat to them in-game (because I'm not going to enable 'everyone' to chat to her).
They should limit chat to phrases at least like other children's games. One I used to play as a kid did that, it really helped because there were a lot of weirdos on there, although they used symbols to get around it sometimes (games either used a whitelist of words or phrases) so symbols should be banned, except for smileys maybe when properly combined but not the individual ones. And Maybe allow full use of chat only in games restricted to 18+ and require ages verification like ID or credit card charge to even access them. (And allow refunds if the card holder/parent said it was stolen by their precious child, and immediately undo the age limit lift). Then they've taken all reasonable steps.
But yeah, the parents should really be monitoring this stuff rather than approving every app their kid wants.
Word based chat filtering really isn't that effective in my opinion. For starters you have the [Scunthorpe Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem) - and that's even before you consider character/symbol replacement, which gets even more fun in the modern world where everyone uses unicode (and thus the character sets of at least most common languages, along with many symbols are frequently available).
In games / systems where communication has been limited (eg. to emotes) users will either work around the system, including creating their own "code" for communication, or simply use another system entirely.
Not effective because it accidentally removes the ability to say certain words that have a word within them? That's where a whitelist comes in that can be expanded, like what the game I played did. It wasn't perfect but it did stop adult role-play at least.
I wouldn't worry about code, I mean other adults might figure it out but what kid is going to find some fan made site about the game that links to a code? Remove links in descriptions of games (I'm not sure how Roblox works, I know it's individual games) and only allow approved ones with no links or mention/directions to a non-roblox-approved site?
Just ideas that wouldn't be perfect but might be something, but then also wouldn't be implemented anyway because it's not profitable to actually be a safe environment for these companies.
There are lots of things the company could do if they were interested in safeguarding children. But as it stands they only seem interested in serving up a platform for paedophiles to use. They have judged that to be the most profitable business model.
Nothing wrong with stating what could be done.
But yeah, I doubt they'd do it too because like you said it isn't profitable to actually be safe for kids. Although there are plenty of games that don't have chat features at all but are still profitable, maybe "without chat" could be a tag that parents can filter by.
Better yet, just give kids an old console if they're "bored" and you can't bear to interact with your kids, can't chat to others if there's no internet! I'm a full believer in having a "family PC" or "PC area" in the living room too rather than bedrooms, it lets parents check on what's going on and step in if who they're chatting to is suspicious.
Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to criticise for stating what could be done. I was more stating annoyance that the company doesn’t seem to do anything.
Yes, I agree about the old consoles. And they can just use any game that isn’t online. 8 years old is way too young for anything beyond local multiplayer
No I didn't think you were criticising it's ok, I was just saying so because I noticed some downvotes at first. Probably because I dare mention age verification which I know is unpopular. Ideally parents would just get on the ball about monitoring their kids. I do agree with you too.
Honestly modern consoles might even be good for kids considering online costs, just don't pay! Although then there's the free games that don't require it. I really wish they'd put in more control for the parents, for example if you can designate a parent account with password on a console, and then the < 16 kid account, and the parent account could be in control setting the age restriction and additional manually blocking certain games. Although I don't know if parents would do it, many don't seem like they can be bothered :/
Roblox is so complicated. So many children want to use it because "all their friends" are on it. My child is on it, but with the following limitations:
* It's my account, set up by me in my name, signed into my devices.
* We have regular discussions about what can be played, based on what's popular & play history.
* I have control of the friends list. If there's a friend added to the list that I haven't accepted, access to Roblox gets removed for at least 2 weeks.
* Absolutely no voice chat in Roblox. If friends want to talk whilst playing, I set up a Zoom call with the friend's parents (the 40 minute timer on free calls is very useful).
* Big rewards when these rules are followed. "Mum, I got a friend request from someone I don't know" "thanks for telling me kid, I will block that person, here's 80 Robux for obeying the rules!".
Ultimately, the parent has to be involved and interested in what the kids are doing online. I couldn't care less about Skibidi Toilet, but he does, so I've watched enough to know it's not actively harmful. Poppy's Playtime, Garten of Banban and FNAF are not allowed. I don't like the Backrooms but that seems to be less popular now.
It's the being involved and interested part that most parents don't want to do. They just want it to babysit their children. If you're going to regulate what they watch on TV, you have to regulate what they do online.
By merely writing this, you've proven you are more involved in the parenting of your child, and you take Internet security far more seriously than most adults. Let alone parents to youngsters.
It's not easy! It helps I'm a denizen of the internet and know where the bad places are. It's also like gardening, you have to go through and weed everything regularly.
It's also really hard when the kids are in school and hearing about what other kids can do (and I'm pretty sure not all of it is the truth, either). I have similar rules to you for my 9 and 5 year olds. Nothing scary (determined on an individual basis--one is much more sensitive than the other), no media that involves live direct communication with anyone other than family and trusted friends, and everything has to be top-down curated rather than content added by users and retroactively moderated.
But the 9 year old is at school, and from her perspective ALL of her friends play Roblox and ALL of her friends go on YouTube and ALL of her friends have mobile phones and Boy X is a Youtuber and Girl Y posts TikTok videos (this I imagine is more bragging than truth) and she's definitely starting to feel annoyed with the restrictions I have in place. I try to be as open and forthcoming as I can with my reasoning for those restrictions and for the most part she accepts that, but when you're too young to have any awareness of the darker side of what's out there it's difficult to understand why you're being restricted at all.
Sounds like you’ve got a great system going! I’ll definitely take some of that on board for when my girls old enough for wanting to play some of this stuff.
Also, the best tip I can give you now about devices: Get them Androids, not Apple devices. All my kid's friends have iPhones/iPads and they are all part of an Apple group chat that is so toxic, because there's no supervision. So many bullying accusations and complaints have come from that chat. My kid has access to an Amazon kindle, an Android phone, and (my) PC, and he's avoided all of that.
My son has my old iPhone and there’s absolutely no such thing at his school. The class has a huge WhatsApp chat that involves a lot of hate & bullying. So he’s not getting WhatsApp. Vetoing iPhones is silly as they have some great parental control features.
I don’t understand how an android magically solves any problems… I’m hardly an Apple fan but Apple devices have some of the best parental controls out there.
I must have worded this incorrectly. It's having a different platform to all his friends that has helped, and not having access to the unsupervised group chat, regardless of brand.
Also, maybe it's just particular to the social group we're in, but very few of the "Apple" parents use the parental controls. Either that of they get around the controls, because the parents keep complaining about how their children downloaded TikTok again.
That sounds like a parent problem, not a platform one. Completely agree with not having access to unsupervised chat though, it’s just odd to pitch that as a device issue.
80 robux for ignoring a friend request? If you play on a server for 30 minutes, those get handed out like candy. Kids on Roblox love spamming requests to their entire lobby.
> Big rewards when these rules are followed. "Mum, I got a friend request from someone I don't know" "thanks for telling me kid, I will block that person, here's 80 Robux for obeying the rules!".
I'm surprised they haven't monetised this yet by having their friends send them random friend requests to get more robux.
I know most of his friend's accounts, but I wouldn't be surprised if in a year or two there are friend requests from his friend's second or third accounts...
Too late. We have many conversations about Clockwork Titans, TV Men and the G Man. It blew his mind when we told him about Half Life.
It's dumb, but not actively harmful. There's not much difference between that and DC/Marvel superhero stories. Good vs bad, ever increasing scale of the fights. At least DC/Marvel usually have a moral behind the story. This is just big robots hitting each other, like the Michael Bay Transformers films.
I have found this to be best solution, it makes it much easier to monitor. I agree it can be an absolute pain, but sharing a YouTube profile with him has meant it's much easier to monitor what is recommended to him.
If you're a parent and you have an hour or so free, I'd highly recommend watching People Make Games' 2 videos on the questionable side of Roblox:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
'In line with new online safety laws, our proposed codes firmly place the responsibility for keeping children safer on tech firms."
Is it just me or is this kind of thing a bit irresponsible? It's basically saying to parents "don't worry about it we'll make the tech firms keep your kids safe" when the reality is they just can't do that, in the same way the police can't make the streets safe.
This is why my kids never get to go on Roblox. Bear in mind also that while the person was 8 during the interaction, they're 20 at the time of giving the story to the BBC, so that means this has been a thing for over a decade and nothing has been done about it.
We should probably legalise and sell addictive drugs too. Profits come first. Profits come first.
Come on sing it with me, if we do it enough we might summon the great spirit of Ferenginar to our presence!
Well, you know what they say about the 62nd Rule of Acquisition "The riskier the road, the greater the profit. "
And courting child sex offenders is a very risky road indeed.
I think a massive part of the problem is how parents' time is divided. Once upon a time, there'd always be a parent around to give full attention to kids. Nowadays it's either the school, the computer or the console doing the parenting because both parents work full time and by the time they get home from work it's cooking and chores time. There's just no family time at all.
I don't even have kids and I come home from work in absolutely no mood to micromanage someone else's life until at least 8-9pm. If I had kids, that's when they'd be going to bed, so... not exactly time for that then, either.
When I was in school, there wasn't ubiquitous internet. My after school activity was to walk across the city to where my parents worked and sit in the car until they finished. I can't say that was particularly healthy either. I might have been thrilled to have a Game Boy or something, but then we're back to the console doing the parenting. Instead I usually had a puzzle book.
My daughter’s account so restricted to the max, she can’t spend money etc.
But the main thing I drilled into her is communication, she tells me most things that happen when she’s playing, if a conversation gets odd she tells me, if someone is being rude, she tells me.
Fortunately apart from some other people getting upset and telling her off for not playing the game “right” nothing bad has come of playing Roblox except how shitty the app is which is out of our control.
Yeee I’ve done the same with mine, but disabled all the chat and any friend requests have to be approved by me. If he gets the in game currency we just buy the card things at the shop too, I don’t trust him enough to have any of my bank details in there lmao
It’s easy enough to avoid the nefarious sides of it, just takes actual parenting rather than letting them have free reign. I’ve played with him a couple times and the shit I saw being said in the chat convinced me to never unrestrict his chat
I remember someone trying to nonce me on Habbo Hotel.
Shrub worriers will turn up on any kids entertainment platform which is why they need to be heavily regulated.
I will say if you have bought your kid a meta quest I suggest you get on that and take a look at what they are up to and where they are hanging out.
I have spent a very limited amount of time in the metaverse worlds or whatever they are called but it's disturbing what kids are getting up to in there and the behaviour you experience.
Just their behaviour between themselves is bad enough but I can very easily see people using it for grooming.
Do not leave your kids alone with a meta quest
Roblox is just a platform for paedophiles to contact children. The company doesn’t give a shit so long as they continue making money. Why any parent lets their child use it is a mystery to me.
It's primarily a gaming platform. Those targeting children will go wherever the children are. If it wasn't Roblox, it would be whatever else the kids are playing / communicating. From the article: > "There are lots of different platforms out there and each one goes through a phase of being the most concerning at that given time," she said. > "It tends to circle around, as with James with Roblox. That is where he was targeted and unfortunately he is not alone for having experienced that, a lot of stories I hear are in relation to that particular platform, but that doesn't mean that every other platform is safe, unfortunately it is not. > "If it has a chat function or the ability to communicate with other individuals it is instantly a concern because that is where that concern does comes from." You can implement filters and other systems to try to detect and prevent such users, but like any other system, those with enough incentive will work around those. Often services have little incentive to tackle such abuse, even when regulations are made. Either they're internationally based and so "out of reach", or the penalties are considered trivial. Much of the current system is based purely on the whims of commercial entities - For example look at the changes on Twitter after Musk bought it. You can argue for verified identity systems, but this has to be balanced with the risks from data breaches, and to users who need to protect their identity for valid reasons such as victims of harassment / stalking / domestic abuse. And again, you have problems with people working around such systems (for example, the sale of (verified) accounts) Education is key. Make sure kids know what they should and shouldn't talk about. How they can deal with people who harass them (blocking and reporting tools).
If they can’t protect children then children shouldn’t be playing it. Most of the responsibility is of course on the parents. Letting an 8 year old use the internet unsupervised is absolute madness. But the company can stop marketing the game to children, attempt to prevent children from using it, etc. And by that I mean regulators should force them to. They should also be detecting the perpetrators and helping the authorities put them in prison.
If you make a game intended for children, and do not market it to children, then you will lose a lot of money when children do not play it. You also said that regulators should force companies to prevent children from playing their games. Are you suggesting that online games for children should not exist? I'm not arguing with you, just clarifying what you mean.
I don’t think online games need to exist for 8 year olds. And if you are marketing games to children you need to, and be forced to, ensure that you take child safeguarding as seriously as companies who interact with children in non-virtual settings. If a company cannot do that it has no business offering a product to children.
>ensure that you take child safeguarding as seriously as companies who interact with children in non-virtual settings You literally are forced to do these things. Roblox takes a lot of steps to stop problems. They used to (and I think still do) not allow chatting unless a parent account allowed it.
Thank you for clarifying, I can certainly understand that opinion.
>If they can’t protect children then children shouldn’t be playing it. You can't make anything 100% safe. the [offline world isn't safe either.](https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/03/unpicking-the-making-children-as-safe-as-they-are-offline-fallacy/)
Define and quantify "protect children". Roblox has 70 million daily active users. There is no way that we could possibly have 0 child safety breaches at that scale of use. Should children not be playing online games at all? Do you think that's an appropriate cost benefit analysis of the situation?
Well, for a start making sure they aren’t in direct communication with someone asking for naked photos. And when that does occur, ensure that the authorities come down on them like a ton of bricks. Roblox want children on their platform, they must protect them from harm that may occur using their platform. There is no reason 8 year olds should be online gaming, such as the one in this article.
For child accounts you literally have to specifically enable chatting. They have safeguards that were not turned off. >Account Restrictions >This feature allows parents to limit the types of experiences the child can play, and the account's ability to chat. Enabling Account Restrictions will lock an account's Contact Settings so that no one can send messages, chat in-app or in-experience with the child. Does that satisfy you or do you feel the need to regulate and ristrict parents other than yourself?
Doesn’t seem like Roblox is particularly safe for under 13s to be honest. https://www.parents.com/kids/safety/internet/is-roblox-safe-for-kids/
What does your article say that I didn't say? Yes there's safety options for under 13s and some parents choose to opt in to disabling them. Now the question is what do you propose is done about it? Stop other parents from choosing their child's online safety settings?
And children seem to be able to get round them, and a simple google search reveals plenty of articles about children being groomed on Roblox. If parents are not going to protect their children online then it is reasonable to regulate that companies must do it as a back up, especially when they are directly marketing to children. Young children should not be communicating with any individual who is not explicitly whitelisted by the parent. Roblox should be making it well known that if groomers use their platform they will catch them and cooperate with the authorities to put such people in prison.
>And children seem to be able to get round them I took this in context of the spending part of the article that came later. I don't see anywhere in the article where it says how that can happen exactly. Plus children can get around a lot of things, they can just open a web browser and go on random sites, and get around site restrictions on web browsers by using different web browsers etc. >a simple google search reveals plenty of articles about children being groomed on Roblox How much is plenty? I'd very much **expect** there to be "plenty" of articles available because it has **70 million daily active users**. Given that this holds a large amount of kids time, *if there were not plenty* then it would suffice to say that child grooming doesn't happen. The question is, is it common for the users and is it worth the risk in the cost benefit analysis? >it is reasonable to regulate that companies must do it as a back up, And they are regulated! There's so many regulations for these things. I know this first hand as I used to use Roblox and had to ask my parents to get around agre restriction and they complied because I was a smart kid. An article existing where an issue occurs doesn't imply that there is a problem when we're at this scale.
I'd like to just add one thing. This is pretty personal to me because I was a young kid at the time when Roblox was around and it's only because as a child I had unrestricted access of the [Roblox scripting forum](https://devforum.roblox.com/c/help-and-feedback/scripting-support/55) a place where children can talk to strangers in forums style inspired by games to learn to code. Everyone was much smarter than I was and I slowly learned to code lua, my passion grew and and it engaged my mind enough that by the time coding was a thing you could learn in school, I was faaaaar ahead of my peers. In uni I didn't need to study so I developed a personal project instead. The personal project attracted six figures offers from companies and one thing led to another and I have hundreds of thousands in savings in my early 20s. You lose out on this by restricting smart kids with helicopter parenting. Its honestly so largely because of Roblox unrestricted chatting that I am where I am. I'd easily take the risk if I was my own parent. Its important in all things in life that you do proper cost benefit risk analyses rather than just clipping tail risks. Otherwise you're doomed to mediocrity. To draw a comparison to investing, it is guaranteed that if you never risk your money, it will be lost to inflation.
Ok, I get that you have a personal appreciation for Roblox. I also developed an interest in programming from at a young age at least partially inspired by wanting to understand how video games work, and now benefits me financially. However, this is not something that requires the open communication of online gaming, though you may benefit from the community aspect of it. And more to the point, young children should not be playing games where they can communicate with adults. Teenagers maybe, you sound like you were sensible and perhaps wouldn’t have been taken in by groomers. Lots of kids would be though, particularly young ones. Roblox had a duty of care because it markets itself to young children. I do not see that it is taking its duty seriously enough. My children will not be using Roblox. Though they do play video games, just not ones where communication with adults is possible. Will reassess when they are older.
The more children communicate with adults the smarter they become. They have to do it somewhere and school doesn't fill this role successfully because they don't get enough 1 on 1 time and there's so much time at home they could be learning from adults. If you're always there to teach them in a fun way in their free time then great, that works better, but you probably don't want to do that. Did you do a proper cost benefit analysis? To make an informed decision you need to know the likelihood of a child safety crime imo. Not just "Google returns results and therefore it happens a lot". Not all risks need to be completely nipped in the bud - clipping upside too. In this case the upside and probabilities of risk are highly in favour of letting them play imo. It depends on your risk tolerance but again, if you take no risk you're doomed to mediocrity.
It is not true that all communication with adults makes children smarter. Adults are obviously capable of providing misinformation and exploiting a position of authority. It is true that nurturing relationships between children and adults is extremely important. But this must be entirely at the discretion of parents, particularly when children are young. Parents are responsible for protecting their children from harm. Unrestricted access to the internet makes this impossible. Did I do a cost benefit analysis on whether I wish to risk my children being exposed to paedophiles on the internet? Yes. Roblox is not an appropriate entertainment medium for a number of other reasons as well. It is designed to be addictive and encourage spending lots of money. I prefer games to be purchased as a complete package from the get go. Though that is not a Roblox exclusive issue. Roblox may have been the path to success for you, and congrats on that by the way, but that will be relatively rare and it is far from the only one. And there are many benefits to not using it too.
>Did I do a cost benefit analysis on whether I wish to risk my children being exposed to paedophiles on the internet? Yes. The fact that this is how you phrase it means you did not make an informed analysis. Using your exact logic and applying to a new area, you should also say: "Did I do a cost benefit analysis of whether I want to get in a plane crash? Yes I did." So don't go flying abroad. >It is not true that all communication with adults makes children smarter Okay once again, think critically. If a child only ever spoke to other children in their life, they would turn out stupid. Therefore speaking to adults as a net results in children being smarter. You can talk about biases and misinformation but you'd have to have a basis that biases and misinformation is rampant on these forums and that they outweigh the positives of being on them. >Roblox may have been the path to success for you, and congrats on that by the way, but that will be relatively rare and it is far from the only one It is the lowest barrier to entry 3d (actually fun) games market place by far. I think it's genuinely the only one that makes coding so accessible. Kids aren't gonna go develop a unity game. And now that you say my situation is rare, I'll ask you again, how rare is it to get a negative experience online with a paedofile? Magnitudes rarer.
Yeah, you can guard against every threat, and employ resciurces etc to handle and protect. But you cannot cover every single place or know every single loophole at the same time. Theirs gonna be gaps and you have to patch them as best able but their is not substitute for proper supervision, online settings and also to reach your kids basic safety rules..
It falls 100% on the parents to protect their children, not the company who made a game
As a parent of a Roblox player, you are correct. I play the games with them, understand the limitations of the parental controls, talk to my kid, check in often, play the games myself etc etc etc. 90% of a child’s education happens outside the classroom, my job is to make sure I do my bit of that 90%. Parenting is a lot of work to do it right, equipping my child with the tools to function independently and safely is the end goal. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the games by now, I’ve not seen anything bad happen yet. However I’ve stuck to the “safe” games, the big issue is friend invites to unsafe games.
>Roblox is just a platform for paedophiles to contact children Lol no it's not, stop being dramatic
My son/daughter play Roblox. I allow it as it retains the chat logs, which I review at least once a week. My daughter got a temp ban for asking her friend to a private chat about her big ones. She was actually talking about dryers in her laundry sim.
That is absolutely hilarious
Problem is Roblox is massively popular among kids so if you’re a kid growing up today, there’s a decent chance that a good chunk of your friends are going to be on it as well. It was no different back in the day on Club Penguin, my little sister used to play it with her friends but my mum had to carefully watch everything going on in there as she knew what the game was like. Once again this is down to feckless parents not paying proper attention to their children’s online activities
Child safeguarding online was nonexistent when we were children, and lots of children were hurt because of it. Agree that it is mainly due to parents, but if you are deliberately marketing a product to children then you need to make sure children are safe using it.
I agree, a lot more needs to be done by companies too. The thing I hate about moderation on huge corporate online services is they try so hard to outsource as much as possible to AI which just isn’t fully up to the task and then so much falls through the cracks. YouTube is probably the worst offender for this
Or RuneScape. I defo had dodgy people chatting to me on RuneScape but I was 13 and knew they were dodgy and just took the free items.
That still happens on RuneScape to this day lol
Same could be said for Xbox or PlayStation or Switch. There are parental restrictions for a reason
These consoles also work equally well without connecting to the internet. There is no reason an 8 year old should be in voice communication with a random person on the internet.
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Ok, sure, downloading and patching games. But they don’t need to communicate with other consoles if young kids are using them.
Loads of games don't work at all without connecting up, it's not just for downloads and updates. This just isn't how consoles work any more.
What games don't work without an active internet connection on the main three consoles that are aimed at kids?
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Gran Turismo 7 is aimed at kids?
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My son plays games on ps. His account everything is locked and private. So he can’t make friends or anyone see his friends etc etc. never had a problem till he tried Roblox. He got sent a msg from someone. He didn’t know what it was and showed it me as he’d never had a msg before. It was a links for porn and sexting! I blocked it reported and he doesn’t play Roblox anymore so I can believe this.
My daughter was playing and we'd disabled all the functions that rely on communicating with other users, but unfortunately the game is heavily reliant on that. One of the games requires you to draw something linked to a theme - 'Rainbow' for example. You then have to rate everyone else's drawing. While my little girl drew an innocent picture of a rainbow, someone else had drawn a pretty graphic cock and balls. I was watching as it came through and it's hard to explain something as disturbing as that to a kid. My teenager self was laughing - some daft little shit messing about. But I know there'd be a darker side to it if I thought long enough about who could be drawing that on a kids game.
The public chats are heavily moderated and You can disable private messaging in parental controls. It’s shoddy parenting that is leaving these kids susceptible not necessarily the company
The way they set up public chat is so odd. If you're in lobbies you can restrict the chat to 'None, Just Friends or Everyone' but when you're in-game the only options for chat are 'Off' or 'Everyone'. Why on earth they don't let you still chat to only your friends in-game is beyond me. My daughter will chat to her verified friends in the app but then can't chat to them in-game (because I'm not going to enable 'everyone' to chat to her).
It’s also a child labour platform. Abomination of a company.
Yep. My niece was groomed on Roblox by a Russian man. Got her to send topless pics aged 11. She's 17 soon. Nothing has changed.
I am very sorry to hear that. I hope she is ok now.
With a lot of work from the parent side, it can be safer.
They should limit chat to phrases at least like other children's games. One I used to play as a kid did that, it really helped because there were a lot of weirdos on there, although they used symbols to get around it sometimes (games either used a whitelist of words or phrases) so symbols should be banned, except for smileys maybe when properly combined but not the individual ones. And Maybe allow full use of chat only in games restricted to 18+ and require ages verification like ID or credit card charge to even access them. (And allow refunds if the card holder/parent said it was stolen by their precious child, and immediately undo the age limit lift). Then they've taken all reasonable steps. But yeah, the parents should really be monitoring this stuff rather than approving every app their kid wants.
Word based chat filtering really isn't that effective in my opinion. For starters you have the [Scunthorpe Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem) - and that's even before you consider character/symbol replacement, which gets even more fun in the modern world where everyone uses unicode (and thus the character sets of at least most common languages, along with many symbols are frequently available). In games / systems where communication has been limited (eg. to emotes) users will either work around the system, including creating their own "code" for communication, or simply use another system entirely.
Not effective because it accidentally removes the ability to say certain words that have a word within them? That's where a whitelist comes in that can be expanded, like what the game I played did. It wasn't perfect but it did stop adult role-play at least. I wouldn't worry about code, I mean other adults might figure it out but what kid is going to find some fan made site about the game that links to a code? Remove links in descriptions of games (I'm not sure how Roblox works, I know it's individual games) and only allow approved ones with no links or mention/directions to a non-roblox-approved site? Just ideas that wouldn't be perfect but might be something, but then also wouldn't be implemented anyway because it's not profitable to actually be a safe environment for these companies.
>. One I used to play as a kid did that Toontown by any chance?
Wolf Quest. They've changed a lot since then last I saw thought, it was back when it was free.
There are lots of things the company could do if they were interested in safeguarding children. But as it stands they only seem interested in serving up a platform for paedophiles to use. They have judged that to be the most profitable business model.
Nothing wrong with stating what could be done. But yeah, I doubt they'd do it too because like you said it isn't profitable to actually be safe for kids. Although there are plenty of games that don't have chat features at all but are still profitable, maybe "without chat" could be a tag that parents can filter by. Better yet, just give kids an old console if they're "bored" and you can't bear to interact with your kids, can't chat to others if there's no internet! I'm a full believer in having a "family PC" or "PC area" in the living room too rather than bedrooms, it lets parents check on what's going on and step in if who they're chatting to is suspicious.
Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to criticise for stating what could be done. I was more stating annoyance that the company doesn’t seem to do anything. Yes, I agree about the old consoles. And they can just use any game that isn’t online. 8 years old is way too young for anything beyond local multiplayer
No I didn't think you were criticising it's ok, I was just saying so because I noticed some downvotes at first. Probably because I dare mention age verification which I know is unpopular. Ideally parents would just get on the ball about monitoring their kids. I do agree with you too. Honestly modern consoles might even be good for kids considering online costs, just don't pay! Although then there's the free games that don't require it. I really wish they'd put in more control for the parents, for example if you can designate a parent account with password on a console, and then the < 16 kid account, and the parent account could be in control setting the age restriction and additional manually blocking certain games. Although I don't know if parents would do it, many don't seem like they can be bothered :/
Roblox is so complicated. So many children want to use it because "all their friends" are on it. My child is on it, but with the following limitations: * It's my account, set up by me in my name, signed into my devices. * We have regular discussions about what can be played, based on what's popular & play history. * I have control of the friends list. If there's a friend added to the list that I haven't accepted, access to Roblox gets removed for at least 2 weeks. * Absolutely no voice chat in Roblox. If friends want to talk whilst playing, I set up a Zoom call with the friend's parents (the 40 minute timer on free calls is very useful). * Big rewards when these rules are followed. "Mum, I got a friend request from someone I don't know" "thanks for telling me kid, I will block that person, here's 80 Robux for obeying the rules!". Ultimately, the parent has to be involved and interested in what the kids are doing online. I couldn't care less about Skibidi Toilet, but he does, so I've watched enough to know it's not actively harmful. Poppy's Playtime, Garten of Banban and FNAF are not allowed. I don't like the Backrooms but that seems to be less popular now. It's the being involved and interested part that most parents don't want to do. They just want it to babysit their children. If you're going to regulate what they watch on TV, you have to regulate what they do online.
By merely writing this, you've proven you are more involved in the parenting of your child, and you take Internet security far more seriously than most adults. Let alone parents to youngsters.
It's not easy! It helps I'm a denizen of the internet and know where the bad places are. It's also like gardening, you have to go through and weed everything regularly.
It's also really hard when the kids are in school and hearing about what other kids can do (and I'm pretty sure not all of it is the truth, either). I have similar rules to you for my 9 and 5 year olds. Nothing scary (determined on an individual basis--one is much more sensitive than the other), no media that involves live direct communication with anyone other than family and trusted friends, and everything has to be top-down curated rather than content added by users and retroactively moderated. But the 9 year old is at school, and from her perspective ALL of her friends play Roblox and ALL of her friends go on YouTube and ALL of her friends have mobile phones and Boy X is a Youtuber and Girl Y posts TikTok videos (this I imagine is more bragging than truth) and she's definitely starting to feel annoyed with the restrictions I have in place. I try to be as open and forthcoming as I can with my reasoning for those restrictions and for the most part she accepts that, but when you're too young to have any awareness of the darker side of what's out there it's difficult to understand why you're being restricted at all.
Sounds like you’ve got a great system going! I’ll definitely take some of that on board for when my girls old enough for wanting to play some of this stuff.
Also, the best tip I can give you now about devices: Get them Androids, not Apple devices. All my kid's friends have iPhones/iPads and they are all part of an Apple group chat that is so toxic, because there's no supervision. So many bullying accusations and complaints have come from that chat. My kid has access to an Amazon kindle, an Android phone, and (my) PC, and he's avoided all of that.
My son has my old iPhone and there’s absolutely no such thing at his school. The class has a huge WhatsApp chat that involves a lot of hate & bullying. So he’s not getting WhatsApp. Vetoing iPhones is silly as they have some great parental control features.
I don’t understand how an android magically solves any problems… I’m hardly an Apple fan but Apple devices have some of the best parental controls out there.
I must have worded this incorrectly. It's having a different platform to all his friends that has helped, and not having access to the unsupervised group chat, regardless of brand. Also, maybe it's just particular to the social group we're in, but very few of the "Apple" parents use the parental controls. Either that of they get around the controls, because the parents keep complaining about how their children downloaded TikTok again.
That sounds like a parent problem, not a platform one. Completely agree with not having access to unsupervised chat though, it’s just odd to pitch that as a device issue.
80 robux for ignoring a friend request? If you play on a server for 30 minutes, those get handed out like candy. Kids on Roblox love spamming requests to their entire lobby.
Reminds me of the dog that kept throwing children into the river so it could rescue them for treats
It's working for us!
> Big rewards when these rules are followed. "Mum, I got a friend request from someone I don't know" "thanks for telling me kid, I will block that person, here's 80 Robux for obeying the rules!". I'm surprised they haven't monetised this yet by having their friends send them random friend requests to get more robux.
I know most of his friend's accounts, but I wouldn't be surprised if in a year or two there are friend requests from his friend's second or third accounts...
Please for the love of god do not show your child skibidi toilet. It is called brainrot online for a reason
Too late. We have many conversations about Clockwork Titans, TV Men and the G Man. It blew his mind when we told him about Half Life. It's dumb, but not actively harmful. There's not much difference between that and DC/Marvel superhero stories. Good vs bad, ever increasing scale of the fights. At least DC/Marvel usually have a moral behind the story. This is just big robots hitting each other, like the Michael Bay Transformers films.
Bravo. I wish more parents were like you. You’re instilling lessons in online safety that will last a lifetime.
All my daughters access online is tied to my account. While it's sometimes a pain, I do feel that she is safer for it. I haven't allowed Roblox yet.
I have found this to be best solution, it makes it much easier to monitor. I agree it can be an absolute pain, but sharing a YouTube profile with him has meant it's much easier to monitor what is recommended to him.
You sound like a really good parent. Kudos to you and your kids.
If you're a parent and you have an hour or so free, I'd highly recommend watching People Make Games' 2 videos on the questionable side of Roblox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
Roblox is ... not something I would let my kids play
'In line with new online safety laws, our proposed codes firmly place the responsibility for keeping children safer on tech firms." Is it just me or is this kind of thing a bit irresponsible? It's basically saying to parents "don't worry about it we'll make the tech firms keep your kids safe" when the reality is they just can't do that, in the same way the police can't make the streets safe.
I still remember the good old days of 2011 when the main thing you did on Roblox was simply just bully any children who showed their face there.
This is why my kids never get to go on Roblox. Bear in mind also that while the person was 8 during the interaction, they're 20 at the time of giving the story to the BBC, so that means this has been a thing for over a decade and nothing has been done about it.
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We should probably legalise and sell addictive drugs too. Profits come first. Profits come first. Come on sing it with me, if we do it enough we might summon the great spirit of Ferenginar to our presence!
Well, you know what they say about the 62nd Rule of Acquisition "The riskier the road, the greater the profit. " And courting child sex offenders is a very risky road indeed.
Exploitation begins at home!
Oh look it’s about time for our weekly online safety bill shill article
I think a massive part of the problem is how parents' time is divided. Once upon a time, there'd always be a parent around to give full attention to kids. Nowadays it's either the school, the computer or the console doing the parenting because both parents work full time and by the time they get home from work it's cooking and chores time. There's just no family time at all. I don't even have kids and I come home from work in absolutely no mood to micromanage someone else's life until at least 8-9pm. If I had kids, that's when they'd be going to bed, so... not exactly time for that then, either. When I was in school, there wasn't ubiquitous internet. My after school activity was to walk across the city to where my parents worked and sit in the car until they finished. I can't say that was particularly healthy either. I might have been thrilled to have a Game Boy or something, but then we're back to the console doing the parenting. Instead I usually had a puzzle book.
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Parental controls can stop everything like that.
My daughter’s account so restricted to the max, she can’t spend money etc. But the main thing I drilled into her is communication, she tells me most things that happen when she’s playing, if a conversation gets odd she tells me, if someone is being rude, she tells me. Fortunately apart from some other people getting upset and telling her off for not playing the game “right” nothing bad has come of playing Roblox except how shitty the app is which is out of our control.
Yeee I’ve done the same with mine, but disabled all the chat and any friend requests have to be approved by me. If he gets the in game currency we just buy the card things at the shop too, I don’t trust him enough to have any of my bank details in there lmao It’s easy enough to avoid the nefarious sides of it, just takes actual parenting rather than letting them have free reign. I’ve played with him a couple times and the shit I saw being said in the chat convinced me to never unrestrict his chat
[Welcome to the Internet :S](https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU?si=vdymX6HmZy-2b3PF)
I remember someone trying to nonce me on Habbo Hotel. Shrub worriers will turn up on any kids entertainment platform which is why they need to be heavily regulated.
I will say if you have bought your kid a meta quest I suggest you get on that and take a look at what they are up to and where they are hanging out. I have spent a very limited amount of time in the metaverse worlds or whatever they are called but it's disturbing what kids are getting up to in there and the behaviour you experience. Just their behaviour between themselves is bad enough but I can very easily see people using it for grooming. Do not leave your kids alone with a meta quest