Roblox Restricts DMs For Kids With New Parental Controls

Roblox has introduced new safety features for minor accounts after numerous child exploitation reports highlight how the platform is targeted by adults seeking to interact with minor children.

The change comes for accounts belonging to children under the age of 13, with Roblox saying minors will no longer be able to exchange direct messages (DMs) with other users outside of specific games or experiences. The company will continue to allow children to see publicly broadcast messages within games, but they won't be able to privately message anyone unless parental permission has been granted.

Previously, Roblox hindered minor accounts from accessing certain games and experiences after a report highlighting games like “Escape Epstein's Private Island” went live. Minor accounts will not be able to access unrated experiences (the vast majority of user-created games in Roblox are unrated) or the Social Hangouts and Free-Form User Creation experiences.

The company is also introducing new parental controls that allow parents to see how much time their children are spending inside Roblox. These controls previously required parents to make adjustments on the child's device; now they're accessible through an app on the parents' phone. Children can request access through push notifications and parents can see a detailed screen time breakdown and set daily limits for their children.

Roblox has focused on child safety after several damaging reports about the platform's “pedophile problem” have been published in the last few years. The most recent in Bloomberg Businessweek described how police in the United States have arrested more than two dozen people accused of grooming children on the Roblox platform.

Hindenburg Research—an activist short-seller—also published a report highlighting how groomer content proliferates on Roblox to attract children to child predators. That report also showcased how child predators are able to avoid detection by Roblox's safety measures, including profile messages pasted in morse code.