A digital playground
The real guide to Roblox

13/04/25

At first glance, Roblox presents a fun, childlike visual landscape. Blocky, cartoonish avatars with disjointed limbs sprint, jump and tumble through brightly coloured and dynamic environments. You’re greeted with simulations of medieval castles, a pizza restaurant, a spaceship.

And with controls such as linking a child’s account with their parents and adjusting the content maturity settings, it’s seemingly easy for parents to have oversight. Roblox has also recently announced new tools for parents of users under 13, including being able to block or report their children’s friends, and being able to block their children from specific games and experiences.

But after our initial exploration of the platform uncovered suggestive behaviours and users sharing their social media handles, we decided to take a deeper look.

In a short space of time, we revealed something deeply disturbing. Despite the safety features in place, adults and children can easily interact in the same virtual spaces with no effective age verification or separation.

Our research confirmed that an account registered as a 42-year-old could add and publicly interact with our accounts registered as children as young as 5 years old and privately chat with accounts registered as 13 years old and above.

Additionally, our account registered as a 10-year-old child was able to freely access highly suggestive environments, which seemed to be modelled on hotels with private rooms and characters dressed in sexually suggestive outfits. In these spaces, children were able to both observe and participate in conversations that often strayed into adult themes.

See for yourself what our 10-year-old avatar encountered:

This Roblox experience wasn't hidden in some obscure corner. Children can interact with adults right across the Roblox platform. The virtual night club and hotel environment – called ‘Boys and Girls Club Roleplay’ – has strong sexual undertones and is accessible to all children. It is promoted using a banner of two avatars, one topless and the other in revealing clothing, accompanied by the ‘smirking emoji'. At the time of accessing, this experience was rated as ‘mild’ in content maturity. Our 10-year-old avatar experienced no warnings about the experience upon entering.

Roblox: a guide

This guide was created following a simple investigation of the Roblox platform, self-funded by the Revealing Reality research team.

It’s an overview of the platform and what happens on it, and aims to provide a thorough understanding of Roblox to anyone interested in child safety, whether parents, policy makers or professionals working with children and young people.

Key findings include:

  • Adults and children can chat with no obvious supervision

  • There are spaces focused on adult themes that are accessible to under 13-year-olds

  • The age verification measures that exist are easily circumventable

  • The safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.

Disclaimer: All descriptions of experiences and features on Roblox are correct at the time of guide completion.

What is Roblox?

With an average of 85.3 million daily active users across the globe, and a diverse range of games, virtual worlds, and experiences readily available to join, Roblox has become a significant force in the online entertainment and gaming landscape.

Roblox is a platform housing games and virtual environments - many of these generated by users themselves.

In Roblox, each of these different environments is called an ‘experience’. According to Roblox, at the time of writing, there are 6 million active experiences on the Roblox platform.

Users can look for specific experiences using the search function or explore curated feeds displaying popular and recommended selections. Roblox offers a diverse range of experiences, catering for people with different interests and of different ages.

Experiences could include player-versus-player games, such as 'Jailbreak', where users engage in 'cops and robbers' style prison escapes, to social simulations, such as 'Bloxburg', where users can build a house and work their way up a career path.

How did we explore the platform?

We spent time on Roblox, exploring what the accounts we created with different ages could do, see, and experience.

  • Researchers created multiple accounts, registered as 5, 9, 10, 13 and 40+, on Roblox to understand how different registered ages might experience the platform.

  • The 5-13 year old accounts are not linked to any contact information and the ages have not been verified.

  • On the accounts we created with ages of 40+ we also verified a phone number, a requirement to access voice-chat on social experiences.

  • All of these accounts were very easy and quick to create. Adult researchers were able to create accounts registered as children, and navigate Roblox as a ‘child’.

We explored a variety of experiences to understand what the different avatars could see and do. We observed other users - following some and recording how they interacted with each other as well as with our avatars. We did not interact with users to ensure we did not influence their behaviours in any way. We did interact with other avatars created by our research team.

It's important to note that while our researchers are experienced professionals, what they did for this investigation was not particularly sophisticated or difficult – and didn’t take a long time. Creating accounts, accessing these spaces, and documenting concerning content requires no special skills or tools – just a basic understanding of the child-friendly Roblox platform, curiosity and a small amount of time.

By experiencing the platform as children do, safety professionals can better understand the actual environments young users navigate and work more effectively to address potential risks.

What are the main features on Roblox and how do users use them?

Roblox is often described as a ‘game’, but it is much more than that. The platform offers ‘experiences’ that are explicitly designed for users to meet, chat and socialise.

For example, a Roblox experience called ‘MIC UP’ (which at the time of writing had been visited 627.6 million times) is designed for users to meet and talk to each other using voice chat. It’s described on Roblox as a “classic hangout experience for spatial voice and voice chat”.

This video shows a collection of interactions our 42 year old avatar saw and heard while in ‘MIC UP’. It’s not possible to know the ages of the other users.

The inclusion of experiences to chat and socialise appears to align with Roblox's mission, where they describe themselves as “the future of communication” and aim to “connect a billion people” through their platform. They describe wanting to enable “everyone to connect with others, communicate, and express themselves however they like” in a simulated real world.

MIC UP is not a unique experience on Roblox, there are many others which are fundamentally social spaces designed for users to meet up and interact. For example:

  • Places like ‘Boys and Girls Club Roleplay’ and ‘Vibe Place ❤️’ allow users to engage in scenario-based interactions, where users can assume different identities and engage with different props / activities.

  • Virtual houses, apartments, hotels, beaches, restaurants – where users can decorate personal spaces, invite others over, and socialise in private settings.

  • Social hangouts (such as those in the screenshot below) advertise themselves as places to meet new friends or chill.

Roblox users of any age can use the public chat function to send typed messages to any other user. This means that adults and children (or adults posing as children and vice versa) are free to communicate through text. Those registered as over 13 who verify their phone number are also able to use 'voice chat' to speak directly to other users, creating an environment where users of unknown true ages can verbally interact with potential child users.

Specific communication functionality available on Roblox includes:

  • Public text chat: Available to users of all ages, allowing them to communicate with anyone in the same experience.

  • Voice chat: Designed to facilitate real-time conversation between users “as naturally as they communicate in the physical world”. In select countries, Roblox mandates an additional layer of security for voice chat in the form of ID verification, where users must provide official identification documents to prove their age.

  • Private areas: Users can find or pay for secluded spaces where conversations can't be seen by others.

  • Emotes and animations: Allow avatars to perform actions that can be used for self-expression, including some that can be suggestive in nature.

Who is using Roblox?

It’s very easy to create an account and access Roblox, whether you are an adult or a child.  

Roblox appears to let anyone over 5 years old create an account (although support information states that children aged 4 and above can safely play on the platform) but relies on users accurately and truthfully self-reporting their age when they sign up. Users can input any age from 5 and above, regardless of their real age, and gain access to the platform.

  • Roblox has different features available to users based on their registered age:

    • Users registered as under 9-years-old need parental permission to play games with content maturity ratings of 'moderate'.

    • Users registered as under 13 years old need parental permission to access certain chat features and are restricted from direct messaging outside of games and experiences, limited to public broadcast messages within those environments.

    • Users registered as 13+ can choose to verify their age with an ID to unlock more features within the Creator Store.

    • Users aged 13 to 17-years-old have access to features such as direct messaging other users, voice-chat with other users (after phone number verification).

    • Users registered as 17+ can access restricted tagged content after ID verification.

    • Users registered as 18 years or older have the option to verify their age through ID verification.

    • When users turn 18, if their account was previously linked to their parents' account, this will no longer be the case.

    Roblox's CEO, David Baszucki, has faith in the platform's age rating systems, stating that they work hard to classify experiences by their “content”, not solely relying on their title or front cover pictures.

    As well as controls which prevent accounts registered as under-13s from participating in some social hangouts and accessing live voice-chat, Roblox claims to implement several safety controls within its social hangouts and environments to protect younger users, including:

What are the main risks to children?

Despite Roblox’s age assurance measures and safety controls, we found multiple features and behaviours on the platform that presented a risk for children:

  1. Interactions between children and adults

Adults and children are able to interact on the platform. Roblox’s age-based safety features only work if users, both children and adults, tell the truth about their age. Roblox lacks robust age verification methods to do this. 

This means that children and adults can spend time together in the same spaces – and our researchers discovered that it's hard to know the true age of who you're chatting and playing with.

Our 42-year-old avatar could easily interact with our avatars registered as 5 to 13 years old.

Video of 42-year-old avatar asking a 13-year-old avatar for their Snapchat details

Accounts registered as aged 5 to 13 years old should not be able to directly message other users. Roblox has this safety feature in place to prevent potentially harmful and inappropriate contact with other users.

However, during our exploration of the platform, researchers discovered it is very easy for an account registered as an adult to interact with users registered as children.

Watch our avatars interact with each other on “Vibe Place”, a dimly-lit social hangout. In the description of Vibe Place, before entering the experience, it states Roblox is blocking access to under 13s, although at the time of writing, our 5-year-old and 13-year-old avatars could still gain access.

Video of 42-year-old avatar asking a 5-year-old avatar for their Snapchat details

While child-users under 13 cannot send or receive direct and private messages, there is nothing to prevent adult registered accounts from adding child accounts as a ‘friend’, inviting them to join different games, and starting a conversation in the game’s public chat board.

As you can see, it was not difficult for these avatars to chat to each other and exchange contact details. Our 42-year-old avatar was able to ask for the 5-year-old avatar’s Snapchat using barely coded language.

Researchers also demonstrated how easy it is to buy and unlock a private room within a hangout. When private rooms are purchased, ‘owners’ of the room can decide to open the space to others, or lock other users out. You can see the 42-year-old avatar inviting the 5-year-old avatar into the ‘small bedroom’ where they could have a conversation (via the public chat) in a more private setting. With a click of a button, users can also lock the room, so other users cannot enter.

Researchers also replicated this experience with the 42-year-old avatar and an avatar registered as 13-years-old, and these accounts were able to privately direct message each other. 

2.      Sharing contact details

Even if users under the age of 13 don’t have access to private chat functions they can still meet and interact with strangers through the public message function, with the possibility of covertly sharing contact details.

We found evidence of users directing others off-platform. While Roblox censors messages that may indicate the asking and sharing of contact details, we’ve seen users apply easy workarounds. Insta becomes ‘1n sta’, Snap (as in SnapChat) becomes ‘S nap’.

Two users chat in ‘Vibe Place ❤️’ on the public message board, showing as speech bubbles above their heads. One asks the other for their Instagram username, ‘1n sta’. The other’s reply is moderated and shows only hashtags. As shown in the video above, this is not always the case.

Our researchers also found examples of Discord servers where nude images are being sold in exchange for Robux (Roblox's virtual currency). Whilst we currently have no direct evidence these interactions involve children, this concerning practice bypasses all of Roblox's safety measures by moving the potential harmful interactions to entirely different platforms while maintaining the social or economic connection to Roblox.

3.      Access to content and interactions containing adult themes

While some children may know to avoid communication with strangers, this doesn’t mean they aren’t seeing things that are inappropriate, even unintentionally.

Experiences ‘Boys and Girls Club Role Play’ and ‘Public Bathroom’ – respectively with ‘Mild’ and ‘Minimal’ maturing ratings – could be exposing children to new adult themes and ideas. Our researchers saw outfits that included fetish gear and lingerie, as well as users acting out having sex or giving each other lap dances.

Both would be accessible to children under 9, unless a parent has manually set their child’s access to a lower maturity rating.

For some experiences, there were stark discrepancies between some games and hangouts’ seemingly innocuous thumbnails and the actual gameplay or environment – which meant they could be difficult for children avoid.

Roblox recently announced a new safety feature that allows parents of children under 13 to block specific experiences. However, this will likely be difficult for parents to implement effectively when there are 6 million active experiences, and, as evidenced above, even games and hangouts with mild content ratings and innocent descriptions can prove to contain adult content.

What can parents do to reduce the risks?

Given the significant safety concerns uncovered in our exploration of Roblox, the most effective way to protect children is to prevent them from using the platform entirely – at least until these issues are adequately addressed. However, we recognise that this might not always be practical or feasible for parents, especially given Roblox’s immense popularity among young users.

For parents who choose to allow access, leveraging the platform’s parental controls is essential, though it’s far from a perfect solution.

Parents can take proactive steps by creating their own Roblox account, enabling parental verification, and linking it to their child’s profile. This setup allows for monitoring and restricting activity, with the newly introduced features letting parents remove users from their child’s friends list and block access to specific games or experiences.

These tools provide some level of oversight, but as our findings demonstrate, they fall short of eliminating risks. Even with all safety features activated, children can still encounter inappropriate content, adult interactions, and workarounds that bypass filters.

To better safeguard their children while using Roblox, parents must go beyond simply enabling controls. Vigilance is key – regularly checking what games their child is playing, who they’re interacting with, and what environments they’re exposed to. Open conversations about the risks, such as strangers attempting to move chats off-platform or the presence of adult themes in seemingly innocent spaces, are equally critical. While parental controls offer a starting point, they are not a substitute for active supervision and engagement.

Relying solely on Roblox’s safety measures leaves children vulnerable to the platform’s persistent hazards.

Conclusion

Our rapid investigation reveals a troubling disconnect between Roblox's child-friendly appearance and the reality of what children experience on the platform. Despite Roblox's claims about safety and content moderation, we found:

  • Adults and children are free to interact with no meaningful age verification

  • Sexualised environments accessible to accounts registered as under 9 years old

  • Safety measures that can be circumvented with simple workarounds

  • Private (or relatively private) conversations between strangers of all ages are normalised

  • Content rating systems that fail to accurately reflect the nature of experiences

  • Opportunities for potentially predatory behaviour through private spaces and off-platform communication

Roblox positions itself as “the future of communication” and aims to “connect a billion people” while stating it's appropriate for children as young as 4. This creates a fundamental contradiction: how can a platform be both the future of unfiltered human connection AND a safe space for young children? 

Where in the real world do we have spaces where we encourage children and adults who don’t know each other to play and make connections, unsupervised?

So why is Roblox different? Why have we accepted a digital playground where the boundaries between child and adult spaces blur, where private interactions between strangers of all ages are normalised, and where the safeguards we instinctively build into physical spaces are often absent?

This is not just a Roblox problem. It reflects a broader failure of digital governance where we've accepted lower standards of child protection in virtual spaces than we would ever tolerate in physical ones.

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Contact the team

Feel free to contact damon.deionno@revealingreality.co.uk to discuss