Kids in Roblox Will Need Parent’s Consent to Message Others

Roblox is finally adding a more comprehensive parental control toolset, which includes limits on how children under 13 years of age can communicate on the platform. 

Roblox has faced increasing criticism in the past few years that it’s not doing enough to ensure that children are safe when playing. 

A recent Bloomberg report detailed some of the issues children face online when playing Roblox, underlining that the company itself reported more than 13,000 cases to US authorities. The report also provided many examples of how predators use the platform to target young people. 

Roblox said the number of incidents is actually small compared with the totality of the content uploaded to the platform. 

Now, the company is pushing a set of new parental controls that should help parents easily supervise what their kids do online. 

"Today, we are sharing the latest updates to our safety controls, including significant improvements to parental controls, how users under age 13 can communicate on Roblox, new content labels, and built-in protections for younger users. We're excited to share these extensive updates today," said the company in a blog post. 

The most critical measure relates to the in-platform communication system, which deals with how kids talk with one another. Children under the age of 13 won't be able to communicate with other people directly except for someone in their friend list. 

Also, parents will have direct access to the children's accounts, which includes the friend list. The parenting tools will provide many other options, including the possibility to filter accessible content, spending restrictions, and even visibility of private servers. 

The company will also add some much-needed content labels that will make it easier to identify the type of accessed content. 

"We've updated our built-in maturity settings for our youngest users," the company added. "Users under 9 can now only access' Minimal' or 'Mild' content by default and can access 'Moderate' content only with parental consent. Parents still have the option to select the level they feel is most appropriate for their child.” 

While many of these new options will be enabled by default, like the impossibility of kids younger than 13 to message other people and vice-versa, it all depends on the parent's involvement. Parents need to actively use all of these new features to ensure children's safety, including stating the correct age, at the very least.