Russia has decided to restrict Roblox’s access across the country over child safety concerns, which apparently includes the dissemination of LGBTQIA+ content.
According to Reuters, Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (often shortened to just Roskomnadzor) said the online multiplayer game creation platform was “rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children.” The communications watchdog accused Roblox of distributing extremist materials, including “LGBT propaganda.”
The BBC corroborated Reuters, stating local Russian media reported that Roskomnadzor had blocked Roblox’s access because terrorism-related content and LGBTQIA+ information are often found on the platform. Terrorist attacks are regularly simulated within Roblox, something Europe’s law enforcement agency Europol had uncovered in a November 2025 investigation. Meanwhile, queerness and queer content, regardless of its positivity, is banned in Russia for being “extremist.”
Per the BBC, Roskomnadzor has identified child sexual harassment reports and the spreading of illicit images on Roblox, which ranks among Russia’s most downloaded games. Russia now joins Turkey in banning Roblox over child safety concerns.
Roblox has faced intense scrutiny in the last year. Following a June 2024 Bloomberg investigation that unearthed rampant pedophilia on the online multiplayer platform, several states have sued developer Roblox Corporation for not doing enough to protect kids from child exploitation and grooming despite the company adding features–such as facial-scanning and age-verification systems–that try to do just that.
Company CEO David Baszucki has responded to the criticism. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Baszucki claimed the platform’s problem with the proliferation of child predation is a good and bad problem for Roblox to have.
“We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well,” he said. “How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were–this was almost 18 or 19 years ago–when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time.”
