If social media is banned, will gaming be next?

With Keir Starmer expected to declare a ban on social media platforms for under-16s – following Australia’s Online Safety Amendment, passed in December – questions are now being raised about video games as another source of harm for young audiences. The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel De Souza, recently voiced her concern over the “risky features” of online gaming in an interview with Amol Rajan on Radio 4. But is the safety of young gamers a parental responsibility, or does the gaming sphere need serious legal reform?

Many gamers will likely recall moments where they have faced colourful bouts of abuse, sometimes in languages you can’t understand. Yet such public lobbies are home to far more sinister threats, especially to young and vulnerable gamers.

Games such as Roblox have come under scrutiny for the multitude of online grooming cases that have spawned from their social features. As platforms of online anonymity, they have proven to be dangerous environments that can facilitate online abuse, acting as places where predators can enact their malicious intentions.

A case that ended recently involved the conviction of nineteen-year-old Carlo Tritta on three counts of making indecent images of a child, as well as engaging in sexual communications with a child. This all occurred after the victim and Tritta had started casually chatting on one of Roblox’s thousands of games.

As platforms of online anonymity, they have proven to be dangerous environments that can facilitate online abuse, acting as places where predators can enact their malicious intentions.

Beginning as a simple interaction, Tritta subsequently encouraged the victim to move communications onto other social platforms, where he started to groom and abuse her over a period of eight months. The previously unregulated environment of Roblox, therefore, acted as an intermediary tool that aided this crime.

Since this case, Roblox have implemented an age verification system that requires players to undergo an “age check” to access communication features. This game asks users to take a short video selfie, which is then used to estimate the age of the player based on their facial features. Users are then placed in an age-gated group according to their estimated age category (Under 9, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17 and 18+) – a category that dictates which other users the player will be able to communicate with. But is this enough?

While ID verification is required if the facial age estimation cannot be completed, questions of the effectiveness of this method remain. The wider communities of the internet have highlighted the various problems and weaknesses of such changes

Many have argued that such facial estimation technology can be easily bypassed by children asking their parents, ignorant of the restrictions they are lifting on their child’s account, to verify their account for them.

Other users harbour concerns about the sheer volume of biometric data being collected by Roblox. While users have been assured that pictures and videos submitted are deleted immediately post-verification, in a world where data breaches present a real threat, many still feel that such claims are not to be trusted. Some have argued that such an approach presents a potentially greater risk: a centralised database collecting the identities of children.

facial estimation technology can be easily bypassed by children asking their parents, ignorant of the restrictions they are lifting on their child’s account

The core of such issues is certainly communication, with these social features presenting the greatest threat to users. Should companies, therefore, remove such features from games with child-focused demographics? Questions must be asked about whether textual and voice chats alike are required for these games, or whether they can be scrapped altogether.

The government could consider implementing a ban in line with the potential future social media one, yet does banning these games outright solve anything? It would be likely that this would just force gamers to migrate to new titles, ones with potentially fewer regulations than Roblox currently has.

With technology and digital mediums constantly evolving, regulations must evolve with them. The features of certain games, while fun to use in jolly cooperation with your friends, pose undeniable risks that must be taken seriously. Inevitably, determined bad actors will always find ways to work around these barriers, but the best thing we can do is to ensure that new ones are consistently put up.