eSafety Commissioner of Australia issues notices to Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Steam
Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Steam have received eSafety notices linked to grooming, sexual extortion, and youth radicalisation risks.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has issued legally enforceable transparency notices to Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Steam over concerns that online games are being used by individuals seeking to groom children and by extremist groups to spread violent propaganda and radicalise young people.
The notices require the platforms to explain how they identify, prevent and respond to harms including grooming, cyberbullying, online hate, sexual extortion and violent extremism. They also ask how systems, staffing and safety-by-design measures align with the Australian Government’s Basic Online Safety Expectations.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said online games and gaming-adjacent services can serve as first points of contact between children and offenders in cases involving serious online harm. She said: ‘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 also said: ‘Predatory adults know this and target children through grooming or embedding terrorist and violent extremist narratives in gameplay, increasing the risks of contact offending, radicalisation and other off-platform harms.’
eSafety said it publishes reports based on transparency notices to provide the public, including parents, with more information about safety risks and existing mitigations, while also increasing pressure on technology companies to adopt Safety by Design. Online game platforms must also comply with Australia’s Online Safety Codes and Standards, and a breach of a direction to comply with a code or standard can attract penalties of up to A$49.5 million per breach.
Compliance with a transparency notice is mandatory. If companies fail to respond, eSafety has enforcement options, including financial penalties of up to A$825,000 a day.
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