Following recent questions about child safety issues on the platform, Roblox announced Monday a number of changes designed to protect young users and increase parental control over the content they see.
To start, users under 13 will no longer be able to direct-message other users, outside of particular experiences and games. And by default, they’ll only be allowed to send public group messages to others within a particular game, not direct messages, even when they’re in a particular experience. It’s designed to strike a balance between protecting kids from inappropriate communications and ensuring they can still play games that require communication, explains Dina Lamdany, senior product manager at Roblox.
“Many of our experiences are interactive,” she says. “Users really need to be able to talk to one another.”
Users under 13 will also be barred from “experiences designed primarily for socializing with users outside of their friends list” and those that allow free-form writing or drawing, which presumably run the risk of circumventing the platform’s moderation systems.
“The reason that we’ve made this decision is that we’ve seen that some of both the content and the conduct in these experiences is more appropriate for older users and teens,” Lamdany says.
Roblox, a platform hosting millions of games and other interactive experiences with other 88 million daily active users, has historically been most popular with young users. But it’s for years faced complaints that it hosted content inappropriate for that audience and, recently, was the subject of a Bloomberg Businessweek report alleging it had come to attract pedophiles looking to connect with its young users. A recent report by investment firm Hindenburg Research also alleged that kids could access vulgar and violent content on the platform.
But Roblox emphasizes that it has extensive automated and human moderation, with all content—including game content and even messages—scanned by automated filters. Underage users are barred from even seeing profanity, users are restricted from sharing off-platform contact information or photos, and “romantic and flirtatious gestures” are banned across the platform, says Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman.
“We believe the community standards are some of the strictest policies in the industry,” he says. “And the foundation of these policies is really from the beginnings of Roblox, where there was primarily kids on the platform.”
Roblox is also rolling out updates to make it easier for parents to control their kids’ experiences on the platform. Parents will now be able to monitor their kids’ accounts from their own accounts from a parental control dashboard—after proving that they’re adults with a credit card or photo ID—and see information on how much time their children are spending on Roblox, set daily usage limits, and see their children’s friends lists. Previously, parents generally had to log in to their kids’ accounts or sit down with their kids to review settings, which isn’t always practical for busy parents.
Parents will also be able to override default restrictions on the types of content their kids can see based on their preferences and their kids’ maturity levels. And if children supervised by a parent want to do something their parents haven’t yet authorized, parents will receive an email to approve or disapprove on their own schedules.
“This means that a parent can be on the go but still can respond to a request from their child or check in on their dashboard,” says Lamdany.
The company is also updating its content rating system to less directly emphasize ages, moving from categories like “All Ages” and “13+” to Minimal, Mild, Moderate, and Restricted. Still, without parental permission, users under 9 will be limited to Minimal and Mild, while Restricted content is limited to Roblox’s growing audience of users 17 and up.
“In order to get access to Restricted content, users must not only declare their age as 17 or above, but also verify themselves using a government ID,” says Lamdany.
As kids get older, they’ll by default get access to more content. But if they have a supervising parent, that parent will now get a notification 30 days before any time restrictions loosen up. It’s a balancing act that’s likely necessary to keep kids—and ultimately adults, with their greater spending power and choices of media—interested in the platform as they grow without exposing them to inappropriate content or messaging.
“We would love for users to be able to sign up for Roblox when they’re 7, play a certain set of experiences and have certain built-in protections, and then keep playing on Roblox until they’re 70,” says Lamdany.
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