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Roblox Wants You to Know They're Listening to Parents Now. That Is Not the Same Thing as Making Your Child Safe.

  • Kirra Pendergast
  • 4 hours ago
  • 5 min read

On February 19, 2026, Roblox announced its inaugural Global Parent Council. Eighty parents from thirty-two countries, hand-selected, meeting quarterly to "share insights and perspectives" and "advise on products, policies, and partnerships." There is a Head of Parental Advocacy with a doctorate. There is a companion programme called Parent Champions. The press release uses words like committed, empowered, co-creating, safe.

If you are a parent who has been worried about Roblox, this announcement is designed to make you feel heard.

I need you to sit with what I am about to say next, because it matters. Listening is not the same thing as changing. And this announcement changes nothing structural about how Roblox works.

I use the term child online safety washing a lot — it's the digital equivalent of greenwashing. It is what happens when a company publicly amplifies minor advisory gestures while the underlying architecture that generates risk remains untouched. Behavioural data from children still fuels monetisation. Social mechanics still enable predators to migrate children to unmoderated platforms. AI training pipelines still rely on content created by minors. And nearly sixty percent of Roblox's users, the majority of their customers, are under sixteen.

A quarterly listening session with eighty parents, with no statutory authority, no independent oversight, no power to compel design changes, and no access to internal data, is not governance. In fact it is barely a focus group.

And real children are being harmed while the press release circulates.


** Trigger Warning** - The scale of what is happening deserves my complete frankness.

As of January 2026, at least 115 lawsuits are consolidated in US federal multi-district litigation against Roblox, representing minors who allege they were sexually assaulted by someone they met on the platform. Eight hundred parents sent a jointly signed letter to Roblox's board, urging the company to stop forcing child sexual exploitation cases into secret arbitration. The same month the Parent Council was announced, Los Angeles County sued, alleging the platform had become "a breeding ground for predators."

The Texas Attorney General sued for putting "pixel pedophiles and corporate profit" over children's safety. At least thirty people have been arrested since 2018 for abducting or sexually abusing children they groomed on Roblox.

And in Australia, also in February 2026, Communications Minister Anika Wells wrote directly to Roblox demanding an urgent meeting over reports of children being groomed by predators and exposed to sexually explicit content. She asked the Classification Board to review whether Roblox's PG rating, last assessed in 2018, still made sense. Days later, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant announced her office would no longer just monitor Roblox's safety commitments — they would directly test them. If found in breach of Australia's Online Safety Act, Roblox faces fines of up to A$49.5 million.

In November 2025, a Guardian journalist entered Roblox with parental controls switched on. Within the session, that journalist was handed a sexualised avatar, cyberbullied, violently killed, and sexually assaulted. With the safety settings on.

This is a pattern. And patterns, unlike press releases, do not lie.

What a Parent Council Cannot Fix

Roblox is not a game. It is an ecosystem — a digital world with its own economy, social networks, and communication systems. And the architecture of that ecosystem has specific features that generate risk.

The established pattern, documented in lawsuit after lawsuit, is for predators to identify a child on Roblox and migrate them to an unmoderated platform like Discord or Snapchat. Roblox does not hard-block this migration for users under eighteen. The workarounds are well known and well documented in court filings.

The Robux economy uses design patterns — limited-time offers, artificial scarcity, social pressure — that mirror gambling mechanics. Multiple lawsuits allege these are deliberately designed to exploit children's developmental vulnerabilities. With over 150 million daily active users, the ratio of harmful interactions to moderation capacity is structurally insufficient. The platform added sixty million daily users between late 2024 and late 2025. Moderation did not scale proportionally. It rarely does.

These are architectural problems. You do not solve them with quarterly parent feedback sessions. You solve them with hard design constraints, revenue trade-offs, and rigorous independent oversight.

If Your Child Plays Roblox

I am not telling you to rip the device from their hands. Many kids have positive experiences on the platform. But the company's public messaging about safety and the structural reality are two very different things, and this announcement is designed to close that gap in your mind without closing it in practice.

The risk is not primarily in the games. It is in the communication systems and the ease with which a child can be contacted by a stranger pretending to be another child. If your child has Roblox and Discord or Snapchat on the same device, the pathway from initial contact to unmoderated private communication is disturbingly short. Many of the most serious cases — including abduction, sexual assault and sadistic exploitation — followed this exact pattern.

Use the parental controls, but understand they are not sufficient. And talk to your child — not once, but regularly — about what it means when someone they meet in a game asks them to move to another app. Tell them it is the same risk as getting in a car with a stranger.

What Real Accountability Looks Like

If Roblox were structurally serious, it would establish an independent child safety board with genuine authority to compel design changes and publish findings. It would release regulator-grade harm transparency reports — not curated snapshots. It would ring-fence all data from minors out of AI training. It would hard-block social migration for under-eighteens. It would encourage independent research with full data access.

None of this is technically infeasible. The company generates billions in revenue. The constraint is not money or engineering. It is will.

Legislators and regulators are getting smarter. They are starting to ask for data flows, architectural controls, and algorithmic accountability. The UK Online Safety Act, the EU Digital Services Act, Australia's Online Safety Act, COPPA — regulators worldwide are moving toward systemic accountability. A quarterly check-in with eighty parents does not satisfy a systemic duty of care.

When your primary demographic is children, you are not a gaming company. You are a children's digital infrastructure provider. Safety is not a feature to be toggled on. It is the product.

You cannot buffer systemic risk with curated listening sessions.

To the eighty parents on the council, your instinct to show up is admirable. But ask yourself — does the council have any power? Can you compel a design change? Access incident data? Publish independently? If the answer is no, then you are not an adviser. You are an audience member in a performance and the most powerful thing you could do is demand, publicly and together, that the council be given independent authority, and if that demand is refused, to say so out loud.



800 parents letter re: arbitration:

Additional sources:

 
 
 
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