Roblox may be one of the most popular gaming platforms in the world, but it’s also been repeatedly accused of failing to protect children who use it from would-be predators. Last summer, Roblox was banned in Turkey over child exploitation concerns. Now, The Roblox Corporation has announced plans to prevent illegal exploitation by placing new restrictions on the platform’s youngest users.
As laid out on Roblox’s official developer’s forum, children under the age of 13 will no longer be allowed access to unrated experiences created within the platform. Additionally, only children 13 and older will be allowed to utilize the social hangouts and free-form user-creation experiences.
Will that be enough for Roblox to quiet critics and solve the issue of children being targeted by predators on the platform? It depends on how successful the new measures are. According to a story filed in Bloomberg earlier this year, The Roblox Corporation itself reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation to authorities in 2023, and two dozen people had been arrested for abusing children after making contact with them through the platform. The Roblox Corporation responded to that report by saying that it didn’t contextualize the scale of the issue with the size of the platform’s massive user base. The company also touted its work with law enforcement to tackle illegal activity on the platform.
The new restrictions for players under 13 will go into effect on December 3. At the moment, Roblox is leaving the rating of the restricted content to the users, but the company will integrate the rating into the process of publishing new experiences at some point in the future.