Australia’s online safety regulator has identified “significant gaps” in the way popular gaming platforms protect children online.
In a new report, the regulator found inconsistent approaches to child safety measures on Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft, as research shows that nine out of 10 Australian children aged 8 to 17 have played online games, BBC reported.
“Australian children have a right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.
Roblox said it “prioritises the safety of our Australian community, especially the youngest users”. The other platforms were contacted for comment.
Inman Grant said weak safety measures on platforms allow “predatory adults” to contact children before grooming them for sexual exploitation or radicalisation.
The report found that Valve, the US gaming company that owns Steam and Steam Chat, was the only provider that did not use a type of technology widely used across the industry to identify and remove known harmful content.
Valve also did not “proactively” use tools to detect child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, with its current systems mainly designed to flag scams, the report said.
Roblox and Valve were also identified in the report as using only internal datasets to train language-detection systems and failing to retrain those models regularly.
“We expect these services to lift their game to identify and combat serious harms such as child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and material and activity which promotes, incites or instructs violence,” Inman Grant said.
The report highlighted that Minecraft and Fortnite, which offers child accounts, generally allow users to self-declare their age. This means people who claim to be adults can access “higher-risk communication features”.
Steam also relied on users to self-declare their age, although the report noted that the platform had recently introduced age checks using credit cards. Roblox has also implemented stronger age checks since last December.
The report also raised concerns about inconsistencies in how the four gaming platforms shared information and participated in industry initiatives.
Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, and Roblox shared industry expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online, while Valve did not.
Elsewhere, Fortnite developer Epic Games failed to share instances of breaches with other platforms under a global program established to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
The report was based on information collected by Australia’s eSafety Commission on how the platforms were protecting users from serious online harm between October 2025 and March 2026.
Australia has attracted global attention in recent years for its approach to online safety. It introduced a world-leading ban on social media use for under-16s last December, which did not cover gaming platforms, and has more recently pushed technology companies to give users the option to opt out of social media algorithms.
A Roblox spokesperson said the company had “invested heavily” in safeguards for children, including mandatory age checks.
News.Az
By Nijat Babayev
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