Is Roblox safe for children?

When Roblox has made headlines in the mainstream media, they have often been negative: from reports of adults trying to groom children on the platform in 2017 to, most infamously, a virtual sexual assault in June 2018, when a seven-year old player’s avatar was attacked by two male avatars, whose players had hacked the game’s code to show explicit imagery. Advertisement The following month, the Sun published an investigation claiming that Roblox was “a haven for roleplaying as jihadis, Nazi leaders and Ku Klux Klan members”. The company says that it has been working hard to tackle wrongdoers and fix any loopholes in its platform. “We’re not defensive if things have ever gone wrong. We hold our hands up and say, ‘This is what we’ve done to fix it, and this is what we’re doing to make sure it never happens again,’” says Laura Higgins, a British child-safety veteran hired by Roblox in January 2019 as its ‘director of digital civility’. Her job is to learn from those problems and prevent activities that could harm young players. “We really do start with safety as our No 1 priority. We acknowledge that we have younger players, so you have to be as ahead of the game as possible in terms of safety,” she says. “It’s an age-old thing: if people have bad intentions towards children, they’re going to gravitate towards where the children are. We’re constantly reviewing the tools that we have, and looking at ways to improve them.