“Deeply disturbing” research exposes how easy it is for children to encounter inappropriate content and interact unsupervised with adults on the gaming platform Roblox.
While the company said it “deeply sympathised” with parents whose children came to harm on the platform, it said “tens of millions of people have a positive, enriching and safe experience on Roblox every day”.
OK, this does sound horribly like 'Look, all our other ships made it to New York!' said the CEO of the White Star Line' but it's also not wrong... and how many of the people clutching their pearls over virtual perversion are at all concernced with its real life counterpart?
The report also found the avatar belonging to the 10-year-old’s account could access “highly suggestive environments”. These included a hotel space where they could view a female avatar wearing fishnet stockings gyrating on a bed and other avatars lying on top of each other in sexually suggestive poses, and a public bathroom space where characters were urinating and avatars could choose fetish accessories to dress up in.
Blimey, sounds almost as bad as Drag Queen Story Hour, doesn't it!
Researchers found that their test avatars overheard conversations between other players verbalising sexual activity, as well as repeated slurping, kissing and grunting noises, when using the voice chat function.
Well, so what? They'll have heard worse if they'd ever attended something like this.
Damon De Ionno, the research director of Revealing Reality, said: “The new safety features announced by Roblox last week don’t go far enough. Children can still chat with strangers not on their friends list, and with 6 million experiences [on the platform], often with inaccurate descriptions and ratings, how can parents be expected to moderate?”
If that sounds too much like 'How can parents be expected to do the bare minimum of what it is to be a parent?' then I suspect that's no coincidence.
Many parents, but nor most imo, do monitor their kids use of electronics. Limiting their access, approving every new apps and sign up as well as monitoring their usage via apps or installing filters on routers. Many don't know that simply by adding a DNS filter you stop most of these phone apps.
ReplyDeleteThen along comes the government with the we know best approach that nanny states do so poorly on forcing everyone to take a one size fits all process dictated by the most useless and incompetent group possible, government bodies.
Technology is moving too fast and the kids are better at it than the parents in most cases. They find ways around this and I had one instance when a teenage had locked his parents out of their router after they had set time limits and restricted sites. He enabled them and locked them out so a hard reset and re-config was needed which they didn't know how to do.
I suspect that most of the kids will have access to apps and sites that their parents don't know about and that won't change when restrictive laws are enacted. All restrictive laws simply stop the law abiding and those that want to bypass them and think they will get away with it will do so.