Australia’s online safety regulator has identified significant gaps in child safety measures across major gaming platforms including Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft. The findings come from a transparency report examining how the services protect children from serious online harms.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said gaming platforms need to strengthen protections against risks including child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and violent extremist material. eSafety research has found that around nine in 10 Australian children aged 8 to 17 have played online games.
The report found major differences in how platforms detect harmful content and activity. Valve, which operates Steam and Steam Chat, was the only provider among those examined that did not use hash-matching technology to identify previously detected harmful material.
Valve also did not use proactive tools to detect harmful content in Steam Chat, including community group chats, beyond a URL detection system mainly designed to block scams. Roblox and Valve were also found to rely only on internal datasets for training language-analysis systems, with gaps in how frequently those systems were updated.
Age verification was another concern. During the reporting period, Steam relied on users to self-declare their age, while Fortnite and Minecraft also relied heavily on self-declared information for certain protections. Roblox had introduced stronger age-assurance measures for Australian users following regulatory engagement.
eSafety said gaming companies should improve detection, age assurance and information sharing to reduce risks for children.

AdvertisementThe Puranic