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“You Cannot Mark Your Own Homework” - What Australia Just Demanded of Roblox

If you have a young gamer in your house, you will know the occasional laughter and murmur of a conversation happening through a headset from the next room. You think to yourself, good, they’re happy, they’re safe, they’re only playing a game.

When it comes to Roblox, it has not been only a game for quite some time now. It is a social recreation platform that looks more like a massive online shopping centre than a game. In fact, when I have spoken about it in public, I often use the analogy of someone dropping a shopping centre into the middle of a primary/elementary school. One full of forums, profiles, chat, virtual rooms, and millions of experiences built by everyday strangers. Today it was announced that eSafety has secured a court-enforceable undertaking from Roblox after its own testing found that adults could still reach young Australian children on the platform, more than a year after Roblox publicly committed to fixing exactly that.

eSafety has found that adults could send connection requests to young children they did not know, without parental consent. That children and adults could see and respond to each other’s posts in forums sitting outside the games themselves. Kids' friend lists are sometimes visible to anyone, and their profile names, avatars, connections, and interests are open, with no privacy at all.

Roughly 1.7 million young Australians use Roblox. It is the second most popular game among children in this country and a struggle for Australian parents to understand and “control”. It is also the platform that most often falls victim to “but I am the only kid that is not allowed to use it” arguments at home.

So Roblox has three months, and within that period of time Roblox must:

1. Stop adults contacting children they don’t know without parental consent and be able to prove it is doing so.
2. Make children’s accounts private by default.
3. Build clearer reporting pathways, and actually tell users what happened to their complaint, which often does not happen.
4. Appoint an independent third-party auditor to test whether its safety measures, especially its age-estimation technology, genuinely work.

This is the first time the Online Safety Act has used its powers to require third-party auditing, and Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s framing was perfect when she stated that Roblox “cannot mark their own homework.”

If Roblox doesn’t deliver, eSafety can bring a case to the Federal Court.

For years, the standard platform response to a safeguarding failure has been an announcement. We’ve introduced new tools. We’ve added parental controls. We take this seriously. And parents, exhausted and unqualified to audit a global tech company, have had to take that on faith. I have a very big problem with the term parental “controls” as it pushes accountability from the platforms to the parents which is completely unfair.

This course of action from the eSafety Commissioner will quietly dismantle that arrangement, in four ways.

It puts the burden on Roblox, with the requirement that they implement tools that switch to safety by default, not on a parent finding the right toggle buried four menus deep, and not on a ten-year-old knowing to report an adult who has been very patient and very kind to them.

It treats age assurance as necessary but not sufficient. You can guess a child’s age through all sorts of technology solutions and still leave the door open if the product around it lets adults browse, message and befriend kids.

It demands evidence, not PR press releases. Independent testing of whether the controls actually hold is a non-negotiable.

It also draws a line under a sentence I never want to hear from one of these platforms again “we introduced tools”. Introducing a tool is not the same as preventing a foreseeable harm; this is something that is used non-stop to avoid accountability, and enough is enough.

Tonight, please talk to your child if they are a Roblox user:

• Do not sit opposite them, sit beside them and go through their Roblox settings together.
• Check the different experiences they use within the platform, check the hashtags underneath and what they actually mean, paying particular attention to adult themes and do not trust the age rating - get your child to show you what happens within that particular experience.
• Check who can contact them, who can see their profile, what their friend list actually contains, and whether every name on it is someone they could point out in a school assembly.
•  
• Make sure you child knows you are their safe space and that should immediately come to you with anything that they are not sure about. Especially if someone asks them to move off Roblox to another platform like Discord to chat.
• Then tell them if anyone online ever makes you feel special in a way that has to stay secret, that is the moment you come and tell me. You will never be in trouble.

For years, platforms have understood that the fastest way out of a regulation is to stand outside the category it names, so the one with a chat function calls itself a game, the one with a feed calls itself a messaging app, the one built on user-generated video calls itself an educational tool. Roblox calls itself a game; it is far from it, and it is definitely acting as a social network now, and for that reason it is subject to Australian Government rules.

What a platform calls itself has never been the question. What it does to harm, or if it facilitates harm towards a child, is what needs to be questioned.

Regulation is catching up, but conversation still gets there first.

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The Armidale Catholic School Office has arranged for our entire school community (parents, teachers and staff) to have free premium level access to our Real Talk Parents membership site.  Click on the link below to take advantage of this great resource.

Social media age restrictions hub

https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions-hub

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