Roblox is adding additional parental controls as a late effort to improve child safety continues

Roblox has today announced other tools designed to improve the safety of its young audience, including ways for parents to remotely manage their child’s account, view their child’s friends list, and play. Includes the ability to limit the amount of time available.

In the coming months, further changes will be made to prevent children under 13 from sending direct messages to others outside of the game and to limit in-game interactions to public messages only. Starting today, Roblox is also simplifying its content labels and limiting the games and experiences that can be viewed by default on the platform to children under the age of nine.

Today’s announcements mark the third set of changes detailed by Roblox in the past month. Previously announced policy changes unveiled Kids will now require parental access to access certain in-game chat featuresAfter this an announcement was made Restrictions on social hangout experiences for children under 13 “Due to user behavior that could potentially create risk”.

Roblox has long been criticized for not doing enough to ensure the safety of its huge audience, the majority of whom are children. This summer, a Bloomberg report revealed that Roblox itself recorded 13,316 cases of child abuse in 2023And more than two dozen people were arrested for abusing minors after contact in the game.

All of the above announced changes by Roblox follow the publication of a Last month’s devastating report This again highlighted examples of inappropriate – and allegedly, illegal – content being shared on the platform, and also claimed that Roblox was not transparent around its user activity metrics (a claim Roblox rejected). Gave”).

Despite the flurry of changes recently, Roblox says today’s announcements were decided upon and will be implemented after “several rounds of internal research, including interviews, usability studies, international surveys with parents and kids.” and includes consultation with experts from child protection and media literacy organizations.” ,

A spokesperson for Roblox claimed that these updates announced today have already been “praised by partners including the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI)”.

“We’ve spent nearly two decades building strong security systems, but we know there’s always more to be done,” Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief security officer, said in a statement. “Last quarter saw a record average of daily active users on Roblox – more than 88 million – and as our platform has grown in scale, we have always believed that our approach to security should evolve with it. Today The launch represents the next step in that evolution.”

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