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Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Revealing Reality created multiple Roblox accounts, registering them to fictional users aged five, nine, 10, 13 and 40-plus. The accounts interacted only with one another, and not with users outside the experiment, to ensure their avatars’ behaviours were not influenced in any way.

Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children’s accounts, the researchers concluded: “Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.”

The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification. This was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences, instead having access only to public broadcast messages.

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[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 24 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

it's been very strange to watch this game i grew up on--pretty innocuously, i should note--gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

[–] Maestro@fedia.io 21 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Online dating and 4chan are both not suitable for children

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 18 points 3 weeks ago

yeah, no shit, that's not the same as "your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features"--not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what's happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don't have a company without systematically exploiting children

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

At least it's pretty obvious what they are, though. I worry terribly for the kids that are coming up actively manipulated instead of just exposed prematurely to harsh reality (like we were).

[–] Maestro@fedia.io 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I plan to do the same with my kid as my parents did: PC in the living room. That way I can at least keep an eye on what they are doing. I haven't figured out what to do about smart phones yet, but I got at least 8 years before that becomes an issue.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 weeks ago

android with lineage on it, and configure things to limit what they can do with it.

you can get pretty close to the best of both worlds, letting them have navigation tools and whatnot while also simply not having the google play store available on the phone at all, and exposing them to a very minimal amount of data harvesting from the tech companies.