Australian government calls for action from Roblox on “untenable” child safety concerns

The Australian communications minister has demanded Roblox respond to concerns “regarding the exploitation of children on the Roblox service.”

According to The Guardian, comms minister Anika Wells and eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant have each written to the game platform to discuss “highly concerning” reports about alleged child grooming and “exposure to harmful material.”

While social media sites like Instagram and Snapchat have been banned for minors under 16 years of age in Australia, gaming sites like Roblox are not impacted by the ban.

Wells said that she is “alarmed by reports of children being exposed to graphic and gratuitous user-generated content on the platform, including sexually explicit and suicidal material.”

“Even more disturbing are ongoing reports and concerns about children being approached and groomed by predators, who actively seek to exploit their curiosity and innocence,” Wells alleged in her letter. “This is untenable, and these issues are of deep concern to many Australians parents and carers.”

“I welcome the Minister for Communications’ correspondence and the Australian Government’s support on this important issue, as we use all of the tools available to us to keep Australian kids safe online,” Inman Grant added.

Guardian Australia documented “a week of virtual sexual harassment and violence” in an undercover investigation last November. The report claims that “while playing as an eight-year-old girl, the reporter was given a sexualised avatar, cyberbullied, aggressively killed, sexually assaulted, and shat on – all with parental control settings in place.”

Guardian Australia reports that Roblox has yet to respond to Wells’ letter. In the interim, Wells has asked Inman Grant’s department for advice on “any short-term measures that could be taken,” including a possible review of Roblox’s “PG” classification or an extension of the government’s Online Safety Act.

Roblox has been updating and adding new safety features to its platform over the past year, including appending a “sensitive issues” content tag to its experiences feature. In November 2024, it introduced protections that meant under 13s were no longer able to access direct messaging on platform chats, and limited what messages they could broadcast in games and experiences.

Last month, further to the voluntary age checks rolled out to “limit communication between minors and adults” back in November, Roblox began its “global enforcement” of requiring users to verify their age before they can access chat.