Major Updates to Our Safety Systems and Parental Controls

• We are introducing significant updates to the built-in protections for our youngest users and easy-to-use tools to give parents and caregivers more control and clarity.

• We are adjusting our built-in limits around how children under age 13 can communicate.

• Parents can now access parental controls from their own devices rather than from their child’s device and monitor their child’s screen time.

Safety is and always has been foundational to everything we do at Roblox. We’ve spent nearly two decades building strong safety systems, but we are always evolving our systems as new technology becomes available. We regularly ship updates to our safety and policy systems. We've already shipped more than 30 improvements this year. Today, we are sharing the latest updates to our safety controls, including significant improvements to parental controls, how users under age 13 can communicate on Roblox, new content labels, and built-in protections for younger users. We’re excited to share these extensive updates today.

These changes were developed and implemented after multiple rounds of internal research, including interviews, usability studies, and international surveys with parents and kids, and consultation with experts from child safety and media literacy organizations. We are making these changes for our youngest users by: (1) making it easier and more intuitive for parents to manage their child’s settings, and (2) updating our built-in limits to provide certain protections, independent of parental controls. These changes have been supported by partners, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI).

Stephen Balkam, CEO of FOSI, said, “FOSI applauds Roblox’s ongoing efforts to prioritize the safety and well-being of its youngest users. By empowering parents with new controls that allow them to oversee their child’s activity in a flexible, meaningful way, Roblox is taking significant steps toward building a safer digital environment.”

Updates to Parental Controls

Accounts with parent privileges: While we already provide parental controls, including spend limits—those have been managed from the child’s account. Today we’re launching remote management, which allows parents and caregivers to adjust controls and review their child’s activity even if they aren’t physically together. Parents who want to be more involved in monitoring their child’s activities can link their Roblox account to their child’s account—after verifying themselves using an ID or credit card. After linking accounts, parents can manage their child’s experience and access from Parental Controls.

Click here to learn how to link your account to your child’s.

Friends list and screen-time monitoring: Part of our long-term vision is to give parents granular controls to monitor and limit how much time their child spends on Roblox, which is something we've heard is important to parents. In the Parental Controls dashboard, parents can now see their child’s average screen time over the past week, as well as their child’s friends list. Parents and caregivers can also set daily screen-time limits. Once the limit is reached, their child cannot access Roblox until the next day.

Built-In Restrictions for Communications

Connecting with others is core to the Roblox experience, and we want to facilitate that with safety in mind. Over the next few months, we are making changes to how children under age 13 can communicate on the platform. As a reminder, our built-in filters and moderation rules for communication still apply for any chat features and for users of all ages, including those 13 and older.

1. Users under the age of 13 will no longer be able to directly message others on Roblox outside of games or experiences (also known as platform chat).

2. In addition, we are introducing a built-in setting that will limit users under age 13 to public broadcast messages only within a game or experience. By default, users younger than 13 will not be able to directly message others. Parents can change this setting in Parental Controls.

We are constantly evolving and innovating on our safety systems. We are always working to make chat incredibly safe and are exploring new ways for users of all ages to communicate and interact safely on Roblox. Many of these updates are launching today. For others, we are actively working with our creator community to implement updates across all experiences. We expect all these changes to be implemented by the first quarter of 2025.

Content Maturity Limits

Content Labels: We’ve worked closely with kids and parents to understand their knowledge of Roblox’s platform; the information and controls they are looking for; and the concerns they have around safety, engagement, and communication on our platform. Children develop on different timelines, and from both our research and external research, we know that parents have different comfort levels regarding the type of content their child engages with. Labeling experiences based purely on age does not respect the diverse expectations different families have.

Today, we’re launching simplified descriptions of the types of content available. Experience Guidelines will be renamed Content Labels, and we will no longer label experiences by age. Instead, we’ll label experiences based on the type of content users can expect in an experience. These updates should provide parents greater clarity to make informed decisions about what is appropriate for their child.

Click here for more about the content types.

We’ve updated our built-in maturity settings for our youngest users. Users under 9 can now only access “Minimal” or “Mild” content by default and can access “Moderate” content only with parental consent. Parents still have the option to select the level they feel is most appropriate for their child.

Age-gated experiences: Traditional rating systems apply to content but don’t consider user behavior when determining an age rating. We take a more restrictive approach for our younger users and are now age-gating certain experiences for users under age 13 based on the type of user behaviors sometimes found in those experiences. These new restrictions apply to experiences primarily designed for socializing with users outside of their friends list and experiences that allow free-form writing and drawing, such as on a chalkboard or a whiteboard or with spray paint.

Age-based settings: Roblox adapts as children grow up, so a child’s built-in account settings will automatically update as they move from one age group to another. We want parents and children to have an opportunity to discuss their current Roblox usage, what features are appropriate going forward, and whether to make any updates to the built-in settings. To facilitate those conversations, we will notify the child and linked parents about upcoming changes to the child’s age-based settings 30 days before the changes go into effect.

Continuing to Prioritize Safety

When we design new products, we are mindful of several important factors. We are fundamentally a platform for play, which differs from other places on the internet, where the focus is on browsing or consuming content. Since the day we launched, we've had a growing population of younger users and we want to help keep them safe on Roblox. We take safety extremely seriously.

We are grateful for the contributions and support we’ve received from child safety and media literacy organizations and child development experts. These experts provided input, reviewed our updates, and shared perspectives that helped us make these controls as useful as possible for both parents and kids.

Executive Director of NAMLE Michelle Ciulla Lipkin said, “As media literacy experts, we commend efforts to improve safeguards, mitigate risk, and give parents and kids an opportunity to engage together around important topics like privacy and security. NAMLE is proud to partner with Roblox and support their commitment to making the online space safer and more civil for young people.”

While there is no “perfect” when it comes to online safety, our overall approach is systematic and thoughtful. We regularly update our policies and systems to help keep children safe on Roblox—regardless of whether parents elect to use our parental controls. Our goal is to make Roblox the safest and most civil online platform possible because it is the right thing for children, their parents and caregivers, our investors, and our company.