Roblox announces major child safety overhaul after Bloomberg investigation

Roblox has announced sweeping changes to its safety architecture following investigative reporting on child exploitation, including requiring parental consent for under-13 users to access unrated experiences, blocking children under nine from games with certain social features, and making direct messaging opt-in with parental approval for younger users. The platform will also implement content labels and age-appropriate defaults across its 80 million daily active users, more than half of whom are children.

Gating access to social features by age cohort reduces the surface area for opportunistic contact but does not assess the character of interactions that occur within approved channels. Detection technology purpose-built for child protection evaluates every direct message for the linguistic and temporal patterns of manipulation, mapping the progression from initial flattery through requests for personal information to demands for images or offline meetings, and surfaces the threat to a parent, school counsellor or platform trust-and-safety team while the child is still in the early stages of a grooming sequence, preventing escalation rather than responding to it after harm has occurred.