Australia online safety crackdown targets gaming platforms

Nine in ten Australians aged 8 to 17 play online games. Australia's internet regulator has decided that's not a statistic the industry gets to ignore any longer.

The Safety Commissioner gave out legal notices for transparency on Wednesday for four of the most used gaming websites in the world, Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Steam. They need to provide information on their system regarding children, staff numbers, and cybersecurity protocols.

They will face fines of about $590,000 per day if they fail to do so. Notices normally have 30 days to comply.

What Australia’s eSafety commissioner demanded?

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said gaming environments have become entry points for predators who then migrate children to private, encrypted messaging channels beyond platform oversight.

"What we often see after these offenders make contact with children in online game environments, they then move children to private messaging services," Inman Grant said. The concern isn't just grooming, regulators flagged that violent extremist narratives are also being embedded into gameplay as a radicalisation tactic.

The real-time chat function within gaming platforms poses an additional challenge in enforcement for moderators. Unlike the regular social media platforms where the posts are made ahead of time, monitoring the chats in gaming platforms becomes difficult, which predators reportedly utilize for their own gains.

The new move from Australia comes in wake of legal pressures faced by the platform Roblox in the US. On Tuesday, Roblox agreed to settle claims from the states of Alabama and West Virginia by paying over $23 million.

That settlement sits alongside more than 140 active lawsuits in US federal courts accusing Roblox of knowingly facilitating child sexual exploitation. The company last week announced plans to introduce age-tiered accounts from June Roblox Kids for children aged 5 to 8 and Roblox Select for users aged 9 to 15.