Alongside new security measures, Roblox disables direct messaging for children under the age of 13.
Roblox announced big changes in its security measures – especially for children under the age of 13 years amid child safety concerns. An important point is the update of parental control for Roblox as well as the limiting of children’s ability to write DMs to other users.
That said, children will still be able to communicate within games, but can’t engage in platform chat at all – at least as long as the adults setting the Parental Control options for their kids choose so.
New safety regulations
In a blog post, the Roblox team called these new regulations an attempt to be able to “facilitate” the connectivity of the game with “safety in mind”.
With these new restrictions, the team also updated its whole content rating system, to categorize any type of content into four categories.
The four categories are:
- Minimal: Which may contain mild violence, light unrealistic blood and mild occasional fear.
- Mild: Which may contain repeated mild violence, much unrealistic blood, some crude humor and repeated mild fear.
- Moderate: Which may contain moderate violence, light realistic blood, moderate crude humor, unplayable gambling content and moderate fear.
- Restricted: Which may contain violence, a lot of realistic blood, moderate crude humor, romantic themes, unplayable gambling content, alcohol, strong language and moderate fear.
Users under the age of nine will only have access to the first two categories and can only access moderate content with parental consent. As the children get older, the restrictions are supposed to “automatically update."
CEO of Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) Stephen Balkam explained:
By empowering parents with new controls that allow them to oversee their child’s activity in a flexible, meaningful way, Roblox is taking significant steps toward building a safer digital environment.
These changes in the security measurements of Roblox come after recent reports about child predators on the platform that also showed the dangers kids are facing in the game and caused major concerns with parents.
The changes are expected to happen by the first quarter of 2025, but only time will tell if these new measures are enough to make sure that the safety of children in Roblox improves as it is highly needed.
What do you think of these changes? Will children really face less dangers on Roblox when the new security measurements are added?
