Online child safety campaigners call for US inquiry into Roblox
Groups claim game platform’s design and business model conflict with children’s developmental needs
Online child safety campaigners including Jonathan Haidt, the bestselling writer on the mental health impacts of social media, have called on the Trump administration to investigate Roblox, the booming gaming and chat platform used by 150 million people daily, including a large number of under-13s .
Haidt’s Anxious Generation Movement, Fairplay and the rightwing anti-pornography National Center on Sexual Exploitation are among groups claiming Roblox’s design and business model conflict with children’s developmental needs.
They have filed a dossier to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that criticises the platform’s “engagement-maximising design features”, alleges its voice and text chat features “repeatedly expose children to sexual content and harmful adults, resulting in sexual exploitation and abuse” and says its in-game purchasing currency, Robux, monetises children’s “lack of impulse control”.
Roblox’s users include millions of young children from the age of five upward who, adopting the guise of block-like avatars, play a choice of 7 million games created by other users. They can also chat with other users depending on their age brackets. Nine-year-olds can chat with 15-year-olds and 13-year-olds can chat with 17-year-olds. The most popular game is Brookhaven, where players can “own and live in amazing houses, drive cool vehicles and explore the city”, but the site has also hosted controversial games allowing sexually explicit content, violence and horror.
The request for an investigation accuses Roblox of “committing unfair trade practices and acts at the expense of children’s safety and wellbeing”. Andrew Ferguson, the chair of the FTC, a consumer watchdog, has been outspoken about child safety online. Last year the FTC ran a seminar titled: “The attention economy: how big tech firms exploit children and hurt families.”