Australia says Roblox hasn’t fixed its child predator problem

Australia's online safety watchdog says Roblox has still not done enough to protect children from adult predators on its platform, despite previous commitments. New testing revealed adults can still initiate contact with minors, prompting Roblox to pledge further safety improvements to comply with Australian law.

Australia's digital safety regulator, eSafety, has publicly criticized Roblox for continuing to fall short of its child protection obligations under the country's Online Safety Act. Despite earlier promises to implement stronger safeguards, fresh testing conducted this year revealed that adults can still reach out to children under 16 on the platform — a practice the law explicitly requires companies to prevent.

eSafety's findings put Roblox in a difficult regulatory position, as the company now faces scrutiny over whether its self-reported improvements were meaningful or merely cosmetic. In response, Roblox has pledged to roll out additional safety measures, though the regulator has not yet confirmed these will be sufficient to bring the platform into compliance.

The situation highlights growing pressure on major online gaming platforms to do more than make surface-level changes when regulators flag child safety failures.

Australia's eSafety Commission — the government body responsible for enforcing the country's Online Safety Act — has declared that Roblox remains non-compliant with national child protection standards, despite the gaming platform having previously pledged to address the regulator's concerns. Fresh testing carried out this year found that adults could still send friend or connection requests to children under 16, exposing young users to potential grooming and predatory behavior.

Roblox, which boasts hundreds of millions of registered users and is especially popular with children and teenagers, has been under eSafety's microscope for allegedly failing to build adequate barriers between adult accounts and underage users. While the company did introduce some new protections following earlier regulatory pressure, eSafety's independent testing suggests those changes have not been thorough enough to meaningfully reduce risk.

In the wake of this latest report, Roblox has once again committed to making further changes to its safety architecture. However, the platform has not provided a detailed timeline, and eSafety has not confirmed that any upcoming measures will satisfy its requirements. This pattern — of pledges followed by incomplete action — is increasingly frustrating regulators who want enforceable results, not just promises.

Why it matters: This case is a bellwether for how governments worldwide are beginning to hold gaming and social platforms accountable for child safety in a concrete, testable way. Australia's Online Safety Act is one of the more demanding regulatory frameworks in existence, and eSafety's willingness to publicly name and shame a company as large as Roblox signals that vague assurances are no longer acceptable currency with regulators. Other countries watching this dispute may be inspired to adopt similar enforcement-first approaches.

For parents and educators, the findings serve as a reminder that platform age-gating and parental controls are only as effective as the underlying systems that enforce them — and that independent verification, rather than corporate self-reporting, is essential to ensuring those systems actually work.