Roblox Exposed: Risks to children playing Roblox concerning

A child’s avatar enters a virtual bedroom and joins others in sexually suggestive animations. No alarms. No filters. Just another day on Roblox – a platform used by over 85 million people daily, more than 40% of whom are under the age of 13.

As Roblox faces mounting criticism for exposing children to explicit content and online predators, the cracks in modern parental control systems are becoming harder to ignore.

Parents concerns

This comes as parents shared their serious concerns about children experiencing addiction, seeing traumatising content and being approached by strangers on the hugely popular website and app.

Early parental controls were simple filters designed to block explicit content. Today’s monitoring tools and screen‑time limits still lag behind the pace of online innovation.

Roblox has become a focal point: investigations uncovered a 10‑year‑old’s avatar entering virtual spaces featuring a female avatar wearing fishnet stockings gyrating on a bed with sexualized dance avatars, and voice chats sometimes circulate explicit language despite AI moderation.

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Harmful content

Roblox acknowledges that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and “bad actors”.

The company said it is working hard to fix this, but that industry-wide collaboration and government intervention are needed.

However, Damon De Ionno of Revealing Reality observed that the new safety features announced by Roblox last week don’t go far enough.

“Children can still chat with strangers, not on their friends list”.

Parental control

Experts and parents agree that today’s parental controls are falling behind. Despite updates platforms still allow children to interact with strangers and access misrated content.

Parents report feeling overwhelmed by inconsistent safety tools that are hard to customize and easy to bypass.

A Mobile Premier League (MPL) spokesperson noted that the digital spaces kids use today are fast-moving and social.

“Safety needs to be built in at the design stage, not added later. Controls must be flexible, proactive, and truly protective. Effective regulation of digital environments is essential to protect young players and ensure safer gaming communities.”

Children’s online behaviour

According to MPL, the problems highlighted by the Roblox case are not limited to one platform. They reveal a deeper, system-wide failure of parental controls that have not evolved alongside children’s online behaviour.

It said that real-time monitoring, customizable safety settings, and standardised protections across platforms are essential for meaningful safety.

“To protect young users, technology companies, regulators, and child safety advocates must collaborate on smarter, more consistent solutions.”

Creating safer digital spaces requires more than patchwork fixes, MPLA said, “it demands a unified and proactive approach”.

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