Playing it safe: how online game services are (or are not) keeping kids safe online

The Australian eSafety Commissioner issued transparency reporting notices to the providers of Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Steam, requiring them to explain how they identify, prevent and respond to child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity, including grooming and sexual extortion, in gaming environments. The report found that Valve did not use any hash-matching tools on Steam and Steam Chat, and did not use tools to proactively detect harms in text or voice chat on Steam Chat, including Steam Community group chats, outside of a URL detection tool that mainly blocked scams. This left all chats on Steam Chat with limited protections from child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity, and from violence material and activity.

The eSafety findings illustrate why relying on voluntary platform measures leaves gaps that offenders exploit. Real-time detection built into direct-message environments identifies grooming, sextortion and child sexual abuse material at the point of contact, flagging hostile or coercive exchanges before they reach the target and surfacing a child in crisis to a parent, school or professional. For gaming platforms where voice and text chat operate largely unmonitored, pattern-based detection that assesses sustained targeting and escalation across Discord, Roblox and other services enables intervention that does not depend on a platform's internal moderation capacity, blocking or flagging contact and enabling rapid escalation to the right authority in an emergency.