Clarifying Our Policy on Romantic and Sexual Content

Today we’re making several important updates and clarifications to our tools and policies to help promote safety and civility on Roblox:

• We’re clarifying our policy that prohibits romantic and sexual content to also explicitly prohibit content, settings, or behavior that implies sexual activity.

• We’re also announcing that, in the coming months, we will restrict all unrated experiences (previously restricted to users 13 or older) to the developer and the people actively working on the experience. To make these experiences broadly available, developers must complete our Maturity & Compliance Questionnaire to receive a content maturity label so users and parents can easily identify which content is appropriate for them and their children.

• We’re rolling out new technology to detect violative scenes. The goal of this tool is to detect violative user behavior in otherwise policy-compliant experiences. For example, experiences that have a drawing feature may be compliant, but this technology can detect violative creations made by users in that experience, like drawings showing inappropriate content. If this feature detects a server with a high volume of violative user behavior, the system will automatically take that server down. Our team will then work with the developer to see if adjustments can be made to prevent that behavior in the future.

These changes are in addition to our Community Standards and overall Terms of Use, which set clear expectations for appropriate behavior on Roblox and define Restricted Content. This update is intended to complement the safeguards and innovations we are continually releasing, including early detection, age estimation, and parental controls. We’re releasing the news about this policy change earlier than we had planned because we know constant progress in this area is as important to our community as it is to us.

To go further, we’re making some updates to which experiences are restricted to ID-verified users 17 and older. We’ve seen that Social Hangouts—experiences where the primary purpose is to chat with other users as the user or their avatar—can sometimes contain inappropriate user behavior when they include certain settings. Although these settings are not against our current policies, we’ve observed higher rates of inappropriate user behavior in them, so we’re further restricting some of them from our younger users. We continue to moderate this type of behavior in all experiences, but moderation is reactive and younger users could still be exposed to activity that could be construed as inappropriate.

As a result, we’re updating our policy to restrict social hangout experiences depicting private spaces (such as bedrooms and bathrooms) to users who are ID-verified and 17 or older. Additionally, experiences that primarily take place in these private spaces, and in settings intended for adults (such as bars and clubs), will also be restricted to only ID-verified users 17 or older. Developers looking to create an experience for users 17 or older, must also verify that they are 17 or older.

We’ve been thoughtful about this policy's design and intent. Many experiences, such as dollhouses or simulations, include individual beds or bathroom assets, but the larger gameplay scenario and the overall design of the experience may not inspire the kind of violative user behavior that we’ve seen in social hangouts or experiences primarily set in these private spaces. We’ve designed the policy to carefully balance user safety and community creativity. We are working on many updates to our policies, detection, and reporting tools. As we mentioned in today’s podcast, we’re also developing a community advisory council. We’ll have more to share on these improvements in the coming weeks.