Source : Perth Now news
One of the world’s biggest gaming platforms is taking minimal steps to track whether someone banned for child sexual exploitation or violent material is re-registering with a new account, Australia’s eSafety commissioner says.
The eSafety Commission released a report on Friday after serving the Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, Steam and Steam Chat developers with compulsory information gathering notices a year ago.
“While several providers have introduced additional safety uplifts since receiving the notices, the report found significant gaps remain in efforts to prevent and respond to serious harms,” eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.
“The findings included inconsistent approaches to preventing high-risk games from being accessible on their services.”
About 90 per cent of Australians aged eight to 17 play online games.
“Predatory adults know this and often make first contact with children on games before grooming them for sexual exploitation or for radicalisation,” Ms Inman Grant said.
The report finds Steam, Steam Chat and Fortnite have a lack of methods to detect illegal and harmful content. Valve operates gaming platform Steam, and Valve does not use industry standard “hash-matching”, which compares content to existing child sexual abuse material.
“Unlike the other providers, Valve failed to use tools to proactively detect harms on Steam Chat, including Steam Community group chats, outside of a URL detection tool that ‘mainly blocked scams’,” the report said.
“This left all chats on Steam Chat with limited protections from child sexual exploitation or violence material.”
The operators of Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite use “multiple indicators” to detect if a banned user had re-registered, but Steam has minimal such safeguards, the report finds.
The report takes aim at the language detection systems of Roblox and Valve, which only use internal datasets and are not regularly retrained.
Minecraft developer Majong Studios, and Roblox, do share information with competitors to combat sexual abuse, exploitation and extremism. But Valve undertook no such information sharing, and Fortnite developer Epic Games declined to engage with a 2023 global child exploitation information-sharing program.
Minecraft and Fortnite generally rely on users self-declaring their age, and when a users says they are over 18, they can then use higher-risk communication features, the eSafety report says, including in Minecraft where they can now talk to anyone as opposed to only under-18s.
On Roblox, the platform has a dedicated team of engineers who work to detect banned users re-registering with new account details, work that includes “off-platform monitoring to detect accounts and communities associated with grooming, sexual extortion and violence material and activity”.
Steam and Steam Chat collect no age verification information. Steam has now enacted age verification only through credit cards, and the eSafety Commission is pushing the platform for assurances it will bring in more age verification.
In contrast to Steam, Roblox brought in tighter age verification in December 2025 after “extensive engagement with eSafety under Australia’s Online Safety Act”, the report says.
“Australian children deserve safe online spaces to play, connect and learn,” Ms Inman Grant said.
“Parents can also play an important role by continuing to engage with their kids about their online play. eSafety’s Gaming Guide for Parents is an excellent resource to help get these important conversations flowing.
“We expect these services to lift their game to identify and combat serious harms such as child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and material and activity which promotes, incites or instructs violence.”
