Turkey Blocks Access to Children's Game Roblox over Abuse Concerns

Turkish Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said on Thursday that access to the children’s online video game “Roblox” has been blocked because the game can allegedly lead to the abuse of children.

Critics of the game in the United States have made similar allegations.

“According to our Constitution, our State is obliged to take the necessary measures to ensure the protection of our children. It is everyone’s duty to look out for, protect, and support the best interests of our children,” Tunc said in a post on Twitter.

“Turkey is one of the countries that closely follows developments in the world and uses technology in the best way. However, using technology in a negative way is never acceptable,” he said.

“Attempts to undermine our social structure, abuse of children, encouragement of violence, and activities that will negatively affect the development of our children, each of whom is a precious gift, will never be allowed,” he declared.

Tunc never explained exactly what Roblox allegedly did to endanger the children of Turkey. Roblox is an online platform created in 2006, where users can play a variety of video games. Its graphics are often rendered in a deliberately blocky and colorful style. More advanced users can employ its tools to create their own games.

Versions of Roblox are available for Droid and iPad tablets, as well as Windows and Apple personal computers and the Xbox and PlayStation game systems.

The platform is popular with young users but not exclusively patronized by children — it has more than 70 million daily active users and close to 300 million intermittent “monthly” users. Children under age 18 must receive parental consent to sign up for an account, and the system has parental control settings.

Roblox has a hefty social media component in addition to its games, which is probably why Turkey suddenly decided it was bad for children. Turkey’s authoritarian Islamist leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, went on a tirade against social media companies in August because they allegedly blocked messages of condolences for Hamas terrorist mastermind Ismail Haniyeh:

We are facing a digital fascism that has no tolerance for even the photographs of Palestinian martyrs and bans them immediately. They are resorting to every means to hide Israel’s cruelty and muzzle the Palestinian people’s voices. Especially social media companies have literally become militants.

Erdogan’s government furiously banned social media platform Instagram in August because it violated Turkish “legal rules and public sensitivities” in some unspecified way. The actual reason was most likely because Instagram would not allow pro-Hamas, pro-Haniyeh posts.

An official with Turkey’s Directorate of Communications claimed Roblox was primarily banned due to “reports of sexual content that exploits children” and because “pedophiles” were supposedly infiltrating its “virtual parties,” social media chat rooms where participants communicate through their avatars.

The Directorate of Communications was also critical of Roblox for using “Robux,” a form of virtual currency. Turkey said some activities involving Robux amounted to virtual gambling that preyed upon children. Robux were also allegedly used to lure children into “problematic activities.”

Roblox objected to the Turkish ban, stressing its commitment to “keep our community safe.”

“We’ve spent almost 20 years making Roblox one of the safest online platforms for our users, particularly the youngest, and ensuring the safety of our users is at the core of everything we do,” the company said in a statement on Thursday:

Every day, tens of millions of people of all ages have a safe and positive experience on Roblox, abiding by our Community Standards – policies that cover everything from profanity to advertising. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to keep our platform safe.

“We regularly meet with policymakers to engage in important dialogues about issues impacting young people, and look forward to this discussion in Türkiye with the important goal of getting Roblox users online again as soon as possible,” the statement concluded.

A Roblox spokesperson repeated to gaming website Eurogamer on Thursday that the company has invested nearly 20 years of effort in “making Roblox one of the safest online platforms for our users, particularly the youngest.”

Roblox does have a whiff of controversy hanging around young users. The company was accused several years ago of “exploiting” young designers by offering them very little compensation for their efforts in creating games on the platform using its built-in tools. 

In essence, the platform makes it difficult for young amateur designers to get noticed by large audiences, and a developer must earn a huge amount of the virtual Robux game currency before it can be converted into a significant amount of real-world cash.

In July, Bloomberg News published a report about Roblox struggling to keep predators from using the platform’s social media tools to make contact with children. Bloomberg pointed to records that showed U.S. police have “arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox”:

These predators weren’t just lurking outside the world’s biggest virtual playground. They were hanging from the jungle gym, using Robux to lure kids into sending photographs or developing relationships with them that moved to other online platforms and, eventually, offline.

Several of those inappropriate relationships developed into serious crimes, such as kidnapping attempts.

According to the Bloomberg report, Roblox staffers were overwhelmed with the task of filtering out abusive and predatory communications from the millions of messages flowing through the system every day, so some users had taken to forming online vigilante groups.

Several child safety advocates were quoted describing Roblox as one of the most dangerous platforms for children, thanks to its massive user base and mixture of social media communications and colorful games.

“Parents are letting children play on Roblox thinking it’s a cute little kids’ game, with no idea what is really happening. If I could wipe one app off the face of the Earth right now, it would be that one – it would be Roblox,” said Kirra Pendergast, CEO of a child safety organization called Safe on Social Media Pty Ltd.