The potential dangers for children on Roblox
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The Hard Shoulder with Ciarán Cuddehy. With the MG Hybrid and Electric range. On Newstalk. We want to talk about Roblox now. So I mentioned this earlier. It is, I think I described it as a game. I'm not sure it's actually a game. It's a platform for games as far as I understand it. But Alwyn Moran is with me. He's a neurodevelopment therapist and the founder of Cogni Kids. And Emmett Ryan, the technology and business journalist.

Emmett, can you explain what it is? Yeah, so you pretty much got a spot on there, Ciarán. It's not a game itself. It's a place where you go to play games. We sort of imagine Lego and Minecraft and YouTube all merged together into one. That's essentially what it is. So people go on there, they can build their own games, they can sort of, you know, share their playing of the games with other people, and you go discover the games yourself to play them as well. So it's a great idea in principle. It should be a really fun sort of somewhat of learning environment for

And as I was saying to you off air, just before we came back on, I may be looking at a company in my 20 plus years of tech journalism that has never had such a disregard for basic safety. And as a result, its own basic potential commercial future. And I'm doing this a long time. Wow. Okay. So what are the issues around safety? Because, um,

There'll be lots of parents, I think, who are going to be interested in this conversation because the kids are playing it. And as you say, it looks relatively harmless maybe at first glance. It is kind of, it's cartoonish looking. It's kind of these Lego-like characters. They're answering quizzes. They're gobbling food in a forest so they can get bigger and they're the king of the forest, whatever it happens to be. There's a hundred, there's a thousand, there's millions of different games on it.

But what's bad about it? Well, I suppose there's quite a few things. Now, I'll obviously get more into the, you know, aside from the child's health perspective. But in terms of basic safety we're talking about here, it's a case of too easy for children to not know who they're talking to. So it could easily be, you know, a five year old talking to a four year old. So you're in there with people from all over the world, whoever happens to log into this particular game. Exactly. And the safety settings are meant to be that anyone under 13 shouldn't be talking to anyone over that age or older.

we'll get into that. We've found that Roblox has not managed to do that very well. But I could just say I'm 12, so I could talk to all the kids. Basically, yes. And most of their platforms have at least taken some measures, not saying they all work, but some measures to actually try and make sure it works a bit more often than it used to.

Roblox uses the honor system, doesn't it? Roblox uses the we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas system. Their excuse in response to a big report in The Guardian was, oh, well, it's a problem for everybody. It's a big report in The Guardian. This group went in using profiles of different ages. I think there was a five-year-old, a 10, an 11, and a grown adult.

And they found that they could all interact with each other very easily, which is obviously a bad sign to begin with, but also access some pretty improper content, you know, very, very easily as well. So give us a sense, obviously, conscious of maybe little ears around the radio, but when you say improper content, what type of stuff might they come across? I suppose typically the word adult might be used to describe it, like, you know, that type of content. Right. And also matters of violence as well that are definitely too much for people with little ears, Ciarán. So...

When I was sitting at the top there, in terms of sort of the two ways of not seeing this, one is it's a case of, like, we can go back to Bebo for some of the listeners who are more my age in their mid-40s and a bit older. Bebo, even when that was around, realised how big an issue this was going to be and very quickly more than half of its staff were employed in safety. And the reason wasn't just joyous morals and ethics. This is where I get to the second reason why I think it's so bad. Commercially, for a company like Roblox, which relies so much on its young user base...

not having a tip-top reputation in safety can be devastating. It's like if you're on an airline and you were known for your planes crashing because you are not, your kids may be your main user base, but your main source of income are their parents, the people paying for the pay-as-you-go add-ons, the Robux, as they're called.

And if the parents don't trust this platform, no matter what the kids try and do to get around to play it for free, they certainly are not going to be getting access to the parents credit cards that are going to be needed to do all that spending. So from both a basic level of safety, but also commercial reality for them, like, and that's what makes these companies get safer is they realize the commercial risk.

I've just not seen this level of hubris. I mean, we're talking WeWork, you know, level of hubris here. So, Alwyn, talk to me then about the concerns you would have about kids playing Roblox. OK, how long is this? Oh, we've lost the time. OK, yeah, we could go a good while here. Well, you know, I suppose the biggest thing really is that the safety aspect, first of all, but also if we know and understand how children's brains develop,

Their frontal lobe isn't, their prefrontal cortex isn't wired in until the age of 25. This is actually what helps us do our self-regulation. It helps us put the brakes on activities, you know, kind of our impulse behaviour. So really, if you think about that, we don't have control of that really until we're 25. Although I'm sure we all know people over 25 who we still question have been wired in yet. Yeah.

We're, you know, like we're expecting our very young kids to be able to go and navigate and self-regulate on this. They just can't do it. The brain doesn't do well to being exposed to that kind of opportunistic activities.

activities that go on. We're also wiring for addiction. Don't forget our dopamine hits that they're getting all of the time. And they're just being exposed to things that they really shouldn't be exposed to. And a lot of the time without supervision. And are there safety measures that you can activate on the game, on the platform, as it were, that will protect your kids? Yeah.

to a point but really it comes down more to like they aren't very effective as we've seen from the way people have broken through if I always say the approach of okay let's assume any efforts to stop playing outright have failed obviously if you can that might succeed but assume failure because no one's going to get it 100% of the time if you reckon they're going to find a way to play this game with or without your supervision then

you've got to at least try and ensure that they are in a position to you know be able to pick themselves i talked to them the way about you talked to me about like fears when they leave the house like you've got to treat it the same approach because they are leaving her supervision to some degree like i have a good friend of mine he makes sure when his daughters are around they're always online with their two cousins in the uk and that's a trust issue obviously but the point is like you know they know that like you know that'll let us do this so long as we're doing this sort of thing with it like so there's always someone sort of watching them when they are online and

Like that's not, that's one small thing, but the fundamental thing is educating, like make sure, you know, kids know that, listen, you know,

mommy and daddy will always be there to protect you or the parents will always be there to protect you but there's times we aren't going to be there so this is us protecting you now by sort of empowering you to look after yourself to some degree now obviously that's not ideal although I'm not getting that what I'm saying is let's assume there's going to be some failures in anyone who tries to outright stop like you know what I mean you've got to be ready for when that doesn't work like personally I don't have kids but if I did I'd really hope they weren't on roadblocks but I would be assuming I'd mess up in some way in outright prevention and I'd want to be ready for that. All right

To be honest, I think kids, even if you have parental controls, kids are amazing at getting around parental controls. Like, you know, it's almost like challenge accepted and they will figure out a way around it. I think the best way, realistically, and I know this will probably be a bit controversial or what parents don't want to hear, is actually just putting off parents

access to it, delaying any kind of access. If you can't, and that's our job as a parent, we need to put in guardrails. We need to allow our children to experience kind of the world and different things in a safe, moderated way without this big tsunami of things that comes at them with roadblocks.

so you know if you feel that you can't do that and that you have to have roadblocks or whatever you have to be super consistent with your rules around it get your kids to buy into it get them to agree and say fine it's not on a school night you get one hour on a Friday and a Saturday that's it I would always suggest put

the PC in a room with high traffic. So maybe the kitchen or the sitting room where parents or adults will be on a regular basis if you can't sit down. Just make sure not the kitchen, but definitely the sitting room or living room for safety reasons of the device, just to be clear. Okay.

And then, you know, you need to have kind of, that's if you're not going to sit with them while they're on it. And that's something for, you know, for younger children. If you're allowing your children access on to anything online, definitely sit with them so that you're aware of what's happening and so on. Because I think as a parent, you can't kind of go,

I don't know what this is all about, but they're on it. Yeah. That's not okay. If you don't know, exactly. And if you don't know what it's all about, then your child should not be on it. And what about, what do you say to parents who are listening to this and they think, ah, sure. I remember these people warned, made warnings like this about video games 20 years ago. I'm the first person. Movies 20 years before that. I'm the first person to tell you Stranger Danger and all that is wildly overblown.

And I'm not saying that everything in Roblox is bad. There's lots of good things. In practice, it frankly should be a good platform for learning. They have just been this level of lax that, like, I'm normally the first... I would normally be arguing at all with how I'd best put this. Instead, you're hearing us agreeing. I am, you know, coming out here saying, wow, I've not seen someone this utterly hubristic before. It is, you know, yes, there are more dangerous things in the world out there, but don't reward their own stupidity as well. It's like, don't reward the stupidity of Roblox. Like, you know, like...

That's one thing I would say to the parents out there because they're the ones being dumb here. And if you want them to get better, you know, withhold your credit card. It's quite simple. Don't let them get those Roblox. Is Roblox an outlier in this? Well, it's certainly an outlier the way Emma describes in terms of their lax attitude to the safety of their users. But

in terms of the concerns you have, is it an outlier or are there other platforms that they'll just kind of, well, I'm not in Roblox, mum and dad said I can't play that anymore. Oh, here's another one that just does the same thing. Yeah, no, I think it's pretty much, you know, all online access, essentially. Unfortunately, there's a ton of research coming out now, finally. You know, I know

I know, boringly, I've been talking about this for about 10 years and warning about it. But now the research is actually following up. We've finally got longitudinal studies. We finally can see impacts on even the structure of their brain, like their outer cortex is thinner than a child. Let's say a child who is online and playing games online for, say, three hours plus per day. Their outer cortex is actually thinner than a child who's

who hasn't had that much screen exposure. Where we normally see that kind of structural change in the brain is in the ageing population. So we really have to get honest with ourselves and, you know, have a proper conversation and kind of go, hang on a second. You know, our responsibility to our children and our children's brains, their resilience, their ability to form good, strong relationships when they're older,

It starts early on. It starts in childhood. You've got to get them the really good foundations, exposing gently to, you know, risks and risk taking behaviour where they can kind of understand, where they can self-regulate, where they can communicate with others, where they can deal with frustration. Because don't forget, all of these games are immediate gratification. We have kids now who just can't, if they don't get something, they freak out.

So they can't manage frustrations anymore. We really genuinely need to start being very responsible and thinking about the long-term impacts. Do we want our children to be in meaningful relationships when they're adults? What do we want for our children's future? Then we really need to be looking at it. What are we doing now in laying those foundations? I mean, primary responsibility, I think, is for parents. And I don't want to sound like I'm abdicating that. But...

We often talk about policymakers and their role when it comes to children accessing social media. But it sounds like a lot of the same concerns exist here. Like there's commonalities. Yeah, I suppose what I'd say is when we talk about the social companies, like a lot of them, and for the commercial reasons, just to be clear, not because they're morally, you know, wonderful people, have at least shown some action. Like the best example I would give is YouTube had major issues a few years ago, about six years ago for the real peak of their problems.

where they were risking losing, we're talking like tens of millions a year in advertising because of concerns over the safety issues of children. And they came down like a ton of bricks. It was enormous. It was effective. Like, was it perfect? No, there are still problems, obviously. But compared to what the Wild West was there before, it was very, very different. And we've seen other platforms like Instagram to some degree is obviously sort of the go back and forth in terms of what it's had to do over the years. But we've seen all of them have shown

Not necessarily for the right reasons, but at least a concerted effort for the most part. But some of them are responding to policy or fear of regulation or actually regulation. In the YouTube example, they responded to market demands. It was kind of capitalism writ large. But Roblox should be treating it the same way, to be honest about it. Yeah, I was going to ask, what would force, do you suspect, Roblox to take it more seriously? Because I think the more the likes of myself at Alwyn...

And really, the more you hear people like me and Alwyn agreeing with each other on something, which you're going to hear a lot more of, I think, in the months to come, that should, and not just in Ireland, obviously, but elsewhere, like you're going to have, you know, veteran tech journalists like me talking with people who are experts in their field like Alwyn, kind of coming to the same conclusion, which normally we were loggerheads. Parents are going to hear that and they're going to be saying, well, that's the Roebuck's gone. Like, you know, cut off the credit card.

Because the bottom line is the parental credit card is the most valuable thing to Roblox. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, maybe there's kids out there playing at morning, noon and night. Set yourself, when we say Tuesday, I feel it's a bit awful to kind of deny him ahead of the bank holiday weekend. Have you seen the forecast for tomorrow? No. Oh, it's awful. It's going to be

rain in the hallway through the day. We're going to the Minecraft movie. I better do the big shop tonight. Is Minecraft in the same space? It's one of the ones which again has a dress use a lot better because basically it realised it needed to essentially like you know so it was a case of if we don't we're in trouble. All right. OK. Well anyway maybe my kids become addicted to Minecraft after they see the Minecraft movie in the lashing rain tomorrow. But I think that the advice seems clear. There are

kind of dangers lurking on roadblocks and parents need to be aware of it. And as this listener says, parents, you're the parent. You're not their friend. Parent. Parent up. Get on with the responsibility. 087 1400 106. Alwyn Moran is a neurodevelopment therapist and founder of Cogni Kids. Alwyn, thanks a million for coming in to us. Emmett Ryan, the tech and business journalist. Emmett, thank you as well. The Hard Shoulder with Ciarán Cuddehy. With the MG Hybrid and Electric range. Weekdays from 4pm

on Newstalk.