From next month it will start enforcing facial age estimation to allow children to chat with strangers only if they are in their broad age group.
Roblox compared its new system to school cohorts such as elementary, middle school and high school. It will be introduced first in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, where children will be blocked from privately chatting with adults they do not know in real life from next month, and in the rest of the world in early January.
Users will be placed into the following groups: under nine, nine to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, or 21 and over. Children will be able to chat only with others in their age group and similar ones. For example, a child with an estimated age of 12 will be able to chat only with under-16s. Images and video used for the checks would not be stored, Roblox said.
Problem: the game is getting a notoriety for being infested by pedophiles and the developers are actively protecting them.
Solution: send your photographs to the game infested by pedophiles to prove you are a real child!
Fucking. Incredible. If this was written in a manuscript, it would be tossed for being too cartoonishly unrealistic.
Do you have a better idea?
Don’t let users talk unless they can prove they’re over 18.
This also has the same drawback as dictating ‘fake’ information on the internet.
Kids are going to think that whoever they’re talking to isn’t some old perv because ‘the verification process said so.’
It’ll make grooming and gaining their trust a lot easier.
Roblox is making absolute bank. They have the resources to actually solve this if they wanted. They just believe the inevitable slap on the wrist will cost them less than they stand to make in the meantime.
Absolutely! Multiple, in fact. In order of preference:
Hiring moderators would be a good option too
With what money? They only made $1.3 billion this quarter! Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?!
Honestly, getting rid of any chat (voice/text) and DM features would would help. I don’t think kids should completely lose online gaming, just make it almost impossible to communicate with anyone on said game. I played a shit ton of Mario Kart and Splatoon online as a kid, but neither of those games offer personal messages/chat features (unless you set them up via app), so I imagine grooming would be almost impossible.
I don’t want to take Roblox away from kids, as I understand how fun it was growing up, especially if you can’t afford a console/games at home. But chat has to be either heavily moderated, or just entirely removed imo.
Pretty sure Club Penguin only let you choose from a predetermined list of ready phrases, it worked well afaik. Roblox could do that, but something something engagement
Them having an office large enough to moderate in-game communications, on every popular language? They have some billions to spare. Serving kids requires a lot of work they have neglected for a very long time.
Facebook was a vehicle for hateful, genocidal messages in Myanmar, and they seemingly got of the hook having no person understanding local language on the market they occupied.
If Roblox primarily targets kids, they can’t go without agressive moderation, psy-help on demand, things one would find obvious, but these are never required, not to say it’s not that sexy as getting profits and cutting corners.
I don’t know if their business model would be viable if they started things right from the beginning, but it would be more stressful to them to finally start doing something about that.
Emote only chat