Australia: online games such as Steam and Roblox have significant gaps in child safety

Australia’s online safety regulator has found significant gaps in the way popular gaming platforms protect children online.

In a new report, inconsistent approaches were found in the way Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft implement child-safety measures, as research shows that nine out of 10 children aged 8 to 17 in Australia have played online games.

“Australian children have the right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual blackmailers, violent extremist content or other harmful material,” said the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.

She added that poor safety on platforms allows “predatory adults” to contact children before using them for sexual exploitation or radicalisation.

The report found that Valve — the American gaming giant that owns Steam and Steam Chat — was the only provider that did not use a type of technology widely used by the industry to detect and remove known harmful content.

Valve also did not “proactively” use tools to detect child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, with current systems mainly flagging scams, the report found.

Roblox, together with Valve, was mentioned in the report as companies that use only internal data to train their language-detection systems and do not retrain these models regularly.

“We expect these services to improve their level in identifying and combating serious harms, such as child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and material and activities that promote, incite or instruct violence,” Inman Grant said.