Australia's online safety regulator is calling on online game providers to step up measures to prevent the sexual exploitation of children. Julie Inman Grant, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, released a report on 2 October stating that child protection measures vary widely from one game provider to another. The report said Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft and Steam take differing approaches to preventing children from accessing high-risk games, and warned that high-risk games can create environments conducive to the sexual exploitation of children, as well as activity that promotes crime or violence. Although the operators of Fortnite and Minecraft have measures to protect children's accounts, they rely only on the age users declare themselves. If a user states they are an adult, they can access high-risk features without any additional age verification. Meanwhile Valve, which operates the Steam platform, does not use tools to detect threats on its Steam Chat messaging service. The report added that Roblox and Valve use only their own internal company data to train language detection systems, and that those systems are not trained consistently. Inman Grant said Australian children have the right to play online games without encountering sexual groomers, sexual extortionists, extreme content that promotes violence, or other harmful content. She called on providers to use systems that can genuinely detect and stop serious threats before children are harmed, and said in closing that game providers need to adopt effective safety measures and apply them continuously to protect child and youth players.
Roblox CorpAustralia's eSafety report names Roblox for weak child-protection measures and inconsistent language detection, prompting regulatory pressure.
Report criticizes Valve's Steam for lacking threat detection on Steam Chat and training language systems only on internal data.
