Roblox has become a hot topic in Southeast Asia as officials scrutinise whether young users are being exposed to harmful subcultures on the gaming platform. But analysts warn that it might just be a convenient scapegoat for wider failures in how children are protected on and offline.
Most recently, Roblox has been linked to the August 18 school shooting in the southern Philippine city of Zamboanga, where a student brought two firearms to a private school, live-streamed the attack and killed one schoolmate before taking his own life.
Authorities were quick to identify the cause.
The suspect was a “Roblox fanatic”, Zamboanga Mayor Khymer Adan Olaso said.
Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla characterised the attack as a “case of desensitisation to violence” linked to the games children play online and called for a total Roblox ban.
Remulla also said that authorities had a “great degree of confidence” that Roblox had influenced the shooter’s actions, even as they had yet to conduct a forensic examination of his devices.
“Roblox in itself is not a dangerous game. It is the chat group ... That is where the coaxing happens, where the radicalisation takes place,” Remulla said.
Roblox, which reported 123 million average daily active users globally in the second quarter of this year, is not a single game but an online platform. It is built around user-created virtual worlds and includes chat features that safety advocates say can make it easier for children to meet strangers or be drawn into harmful communities.
Online games have been scrutinised as a potential pathway for radicalisation since a school shooting in the Philippine city of Tacloban that killed three students in June. One of the suspects was found to have been an avid player of the German video game GoreBox.
Philippine officials met Roblox executives in Singapore last month to discuss measures to protect Filipino children from online harm. After the meeting, Department of Information and Communications Technology Secretary Henry Aguda said Roblox had agreed to strengthen child safety protections for users in the Philippines.
While concerns about Roblox are valid, not every new platform is a threat, according to Munira Mustaffa, executive director of Chasseur Group and a senior fellow at Verve Research: “We risk repeating the same mistake we did with TikTok back in the early 2020s,” she said.
“It’s the same conversation all over again. Tomorrow will be a new platform but the same debate. It will never end unless we understand what exactly is the problem and what we are countering.”
If you have suicidal thoughts or know someone who is experiencing them, help is available. In Hong Kong, you can dial 18111 for the government-run Mental Health Support Hotline. You can also call +852 2896 0000 for The Samaritans or +852 2382 0000 for Suicide Prevention Services. In the US, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. For a list of other nations’ helplines, see this page.
