Revealing Reality created multiple Roblox accounts, registering them to fictional users aged five, nine, 10, 13 and 40-plus. The accounts interacted only with one another, and not with users outside the experiment, to ensure their avatars’ behaviours were not influenced in any way.
Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children’s accounts, the researchers concluded: “Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.”
The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification. This was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences, instead having access only to public broadcast messages.
it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off
Online dating and 4chan are both not suitable for children
yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children
At least it’s pretty obvious what they are, though. I worry terribly for the kids that are coming up actively manipulated instead of just exposed prematurely to harsh reality (like we were).
I plan to do the same with my kid as my parents did: PC in the living room. That way I can at least keep an eye on what they are doing. I haven’t figured out what to do about smart phones yet, but I got at least 8 years before that becomes an issue.
android with lineage on it, and configure things to limit what they can do with it.
you can get pretty close to the best of both worlds, letting them have navigation tools and whatnot while also simply not having the google play store available on the phone at all, and exposing them to a very minimal amount of data harvesting from the tech companies.
If you don’t watch what your kids play, your kids will find something inappropriate to play. This isn’t just a Roblox problem. Not suggesting Roblox shouldn’t have better moderation (holy hell should they) but this isn’t unexpected. Should it be? Maybe. Could they realistically do it? Probably not without some serious vetting changes—changes that would make “experience makers” have to wait to get their games approved.
Lock down the accounts so they can’t see server chat or get messages from randoms. Only allow your (parent) account to add friends. Play with them. Be present, at least somewhat, when they play.
Source: Play Roblox with my kids all the time.
I never had kids of my own, but seeing what my stepkids got up to from 2009-2016 (they were 6 and 7 to start), I became very worried about how things had shifted to online interaction. They wouldn’t have their own computers for another couple of years, but I gave them my netbook (remember those?) once I’d gotten a tower built (UPS drop-shipped my old one, and that’s not a euphemism … thank god I had the presence of mind to remove the hard drives).
It’s one thing to play SimCity for hours on end locally, which my parents allowed. It’s something entirely different to foist the whole of the internet on them without having concepts of online hygiene.
Somehow, they missed all the actual disturbing things about Roblox here.
People Make Games did a much better job on reporting the issues with Roblox.
This is a great rundown. I’ve never been in the ecosystem and thus have zero exposure.
But part of me thinks, having done development in noncoding roles and getting zero further compensation for, say, something that could save a corporate giant $7 million a year if fully rolled out, this is just grooming kids for what they’ll be subjected to after going into massive debt for a degree.
I think the real issue is how Roblox takes advantage of kids lack of knowledge about microtransactions and FOMO to create a generation of free-to-play dupes while also exploiting anyone that makes content for them, but that’s just my opinion.
