So basically we have to wait for Roblox to contact us before we find out something is an issue.
I don’t care how long the list is. I could just do Ctrl + F to quickly see if something is in a long list. We understand topics are evolving but you can always edit and add to the list.
Maybe make a website just for sensitive topics and website can update live with relevant sensitive topics or just an announcement you edit would be nice.
This is a good update.
People are forgetting this is only for users under 13. Children. This change is not limiting your freedom of speech if you are above that age.
I don’t think anyone is arguing children should have unrestricted access to the internet, that’s obviously going to be a net negative for their development. I don’t understand why this update is at all controversial.
That said, I assume this update only determines users’ age based off what they enter and does not require age verification. As soon as you add mandatory age verification you are limiting freedom of speech.
The purpose of Roblox is not to discuss controversial political topics, but it does have a large and growing number of 17+ users and I think those users should always be allowed to discuss controversial topics as that’s what leads to common understanding and a functioning democracy.
This feels like a very convenient way for them to just take down any game they dislike without a good enough reason.
The way this update was presented is very worrying, but after thinking about it some more I don’t really think it’ll be that big of a deal.
One of my first thoughts was that an innocent hospital roleplay game could be affected if it contained a vaccine tool. But realistically, the game is not going to be entirely about vaccines. So it would not be affected.
Be honest, how many Roblox games have you seen that are primarily about one of the “sensitive issues” listed here? I can’t even think of any.
WHO is making Roblox games specifically about this stuff?? Why does this even need to be added to content maturity? I thought you weren’t allowed to talk about real-world politics anyway?
This update seems more pointless than anything else.
Instead of instilling censorship, how about Roblox only focuses on the experiences spreading misinformation or inappropriately displaying certain topics and moderates them–oh, right.
The decision makers at Roblox are making some really bad choices and taking this platform on a dark path.
I am not implying adults have to be separate from a game with children. If adults want to go play Phantom Forces, all the power to them. As long as they follow the terms of service and community guidelines, I don’t see the issue with that. What I meant was adults should have the option to be separate from children if they choose by playing adult only games on another platform with ID verification. I don’t think any of us want kids to be in the same game/experience where adults are doing things like dating. That’s weird. Like if David really wants to go down that road he has to do something to separate it way more than it is now. It should not be easy access for children to get a hold of adult content on Roblox.
For your information, those holidays all have religious roots
Do you refers to the case that children access to adult contents using parents’ account? It is responsible to the parents, isn’t it?
this is such a bad idea because you’re game will have the ability to be blocked off by parents because it covered something which wasn’t controversial
Yeah, if something BECOMES controversial after the fact, it shouldn’t be censored?
I think this update is great, people call it dystopian censorship, i call it good parenting settings, it’s litteraly for the better and the platform in general, as it currently experiences major flood of Not Safe For Work content.
Many topics should not be shown to children, Roblox did the right thing.
Accept good things for once 
there is nothing wrong with being gay and it will help with children being able to identify their feelings at this time and a lot of the times you cant really force being gay anyway or change that so its not a bad thing or wouldnt make anything different in the child
and it would help to be educated by vaccines from a game, a lot of kids attention spans is low and if its misinformation they’d still figure it out at some point
I know some people are very angry, but without wishing to comment on it, I have a serious question in relation to games which are politics-and-government roleplay related.
Say for instance you have a nation or other government roleplay community. The community has elections to political office. The community’s political leaders can create policies and laws relating to complex social issues (like immigration, gun control, affirmative action, religious freedom). E.g. the roleplay legislature can pass a law banning assault rifles, and people can protest about that.
Although the game isn’t about gun control, gun control policies may be omnipresent in fact, given that players now cannot easily find guns etc. How would such a game have to report itself for the purposes of the questionnaire?
I agree with this. Children should be exposed to concepts like being gay. If a child isn’t exposed to the differences in people soon enough then that may lead to the child hating or alienating the people with those differences. There is also the fact that they can better express themselves sooner if they learned the concept.
Being gay shouldn’t be forced, but also never alienated. That’s my take on it.
The problem here is more so that they’ve created such a loose definition of what is “controversial” that you are now forced to be incredibly careful about what you include in your games out of fear that you could suddenly be locked out of a decently sized portion of the playerbase just because your game now suddenly includes “controversial” content.
I know some people are understandably angry, and Roblox has sometimes done some pretty annoying things to game developers, but I do sympathise with the hard time Roblox’s legal department are no doubt going through right now on this particular issue.
All of the ambiguities around “contentious” content seem to me to derive from the wider legal climate.
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) recently held in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents had a right to opt out of “sensitive subjects” in schools (the subjects at issue before SCOTUS were books about LGBT people, like “Pride Puppy”). While Mahmoud only relates to public schools, the decision needs to be viewed together with the case decided last year, Moody v. NetChoice, LLC. Although SCOTUS punted that case back to lower courts, it’s still circulating around. If the governments (Ken Paxton in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida) succeed, then that will open the door to a host of additional laws compelling private companies like Roblox to accomodate the wishes of parents, who may or may not want their child to be exposed to content which says that they do not like, e.g. that prayer should/shouldn’t be allowed in schools.
Oh and SCOTUS implicitly overruled Ashcroft v. ACLU and ACLU v. Reno (decided right when the internet started becoming popular 20+ years ago) in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton a few months ago. While not directly related to a “parental heckler’s veto” (it was about age restrictions for adult content) Paxton certainly doesn’t help insofar as it relaxes the standard required for internet content restrictions (from strict scrutiny, which is harder for an internet-content-restriction law to pass, to intermediate scrutiny, which is easier).
That’s just the start. I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough on the exact plans in each jurisdiction when it comes to internet regulations, but it does seem to me that as a multijurisdictional, online, child-friendly gaming platform Roblox would want to err on the side of caution, rather than sailing closer to the wind like other sites with a different demographic might.
Ultimately, what’s happening is a classic “chilling effect”, where a private actor (aka Roblox) will pre-comply with what they believe will the the law in the near future so as to avoid getting sued, and even greater cost. Alternatively, Roblox would face the prospect of being classified together with adult content sites (see social media sites’ like Twitter and Bluesky’s reactions to the British Online Safety Act), which is obviously not a risk they are going to run as a blocky gaming platform. Note the very careful language:
Emphasis on “specific” to my mind implies not that no extrinsic pressure is being placed on Roblox, but rather that the general climate is one which is unfavourable to generalised access to these themes.
None of this is to argue that this change is good (learning and being exposed to ideas through play is a great way to learn after all) but it does seem to me to be reflective of an earnest attempt to pre-empt legal entanglements looming on the horizon (even if they eventually come to little or nothing).
My only issue with this update is purely the fact that they somehow are unable to provide some hard, concrete list of exactly what is considered “controversial” and actively update that list. If moderators are able to determine that something is controversial then that absolutely means they have such a list somewhere and it’s therefor inexcusable why it cannot be made public.
The fact that we can make a game with content that, according to our own understanding, should not be controversial and then happen to find out later after publishing that it actually is controversial is insane and an indicator that this update should have been left to be thought out for longer.
Roblox can’t because the Court only knows controversial subjects when they see them. To know you basically have to wait for a legislature to pass a law, not comply, wait for a state attorney general to sue you in Amarillo in the Northern District of Texas, appeal, then wait for an appeals court to tell if you it’s controversial or not.
Some companies will take the risk, a child-friendly blocky gaming website, probably not.
(I should also point out that neither Roblox nor I can give legal advice).
I don’t think you understand what I mean. I mean there’s no excuse why they cannot provide a list of all the things moderators are gonna be looking for that they currently consider controversial and keep that list up to date whenever something new is considered controversial.
It’s the fact that, when planning out a game idea, we have zero clue what Roblox will be considering controversial according to their own team’s monitoring of global events. We could spend a lot of time working on a game believing what we have planned out is not controversial only to find out after releasing it that there was something controversial in it.
