Australia says platforms like Steam and Roblox have 'significant' child safety gaps

Australia’s online information regulator has identified "significant gaps" in how popular gaming platforms protect children online. In a recent study it found inconsistent approaches across Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft regarding child safety measures, with the research showing that 9 retired of 10 children aged 8 to 17 successful Australia person played online games. "Australian children person a close to play online without being exposed to predators, intersexual extortionists, convulsive extremist contented oregon different harmful material," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said. She warned that weak safeguards on platforms allow "predatory adults" to make contact with children before grooming them for sexual exploitation or radicalisation. The study revealed that Valve – the US gaming company that owns Steam and Steam Chat – was the sole provider that did not employ a type of technology widely used by the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. Valve also did not "proactively" use tools to monitor child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, with existing systems mainly flagging scams. Roblox, alongside Valve, was noted for relying only on internal datasets to train its connection‑detection systems and for not regularly retraining those models. "We expect these services to assistance their crippled to place and combat superior harms specified arsenic kid intersexual exploitation, intersexual extortion and worldly and enactment which promotes, incites oregon instructs violence," Inman-Grant said. Minecraft and Fortnite, which do offer kid accounts, mostly allow users to self‑declare their age, meaning anyone who claims to be an adult can access "higher‑risk connection features". Steam similarly relied on self‑declaration, although the study acknowledged that the platform had recently introduced age checks using credit cards and that Roblox had implemented stronger age checks since past December. Another issue highlighted was the inconsistent manner in which the four gaming platforms share information and participate in industry initiatives. Mojang Studios, developer of Minecraft, and Roblox exchanged expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online, but Valve did not. Elsewhere, Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, failed to share instances of breaches with other platforms under a global programme designed to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse. The study 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 made global headlines in recent years for its stance on online safety, after it introduced its world‑leading social media prohibition for under-16s past December - which did not see gaming platforms - and a more recent push to unit tech giants to connection users a accidental to opt-out of societal media algorithms. Valve, Fortnite, Roblox and Microsoft - which owns Minecraft - have been contacted for comment.