Why is Discord censored in Roblox?

Roblox has a text filter that prohibits players from seeing or sending profanity and restricts personally identifiable information, which replaces the now-discontinued Safe Chat that was previously used to prevent young players from sending messages that were not pre-programmed. Currently, the censored text is replaced with a hashtag symbol (#).

Historically, Roblox used a hidden word blacklist that came bundled with the Roblox Player, stored in the file diogenes.fnt. Speaking any word contained in that list would usually render an instant ban from the website. The player would then be disconnected from whatever game they're playing. Repeated infractions using the chatbox would usually render a termination. Only 13+ accounts could chat or post on the website (forums, comments, etc.), as well as being able to chat freely in-game. Guests were restricted to the Safe Chat, as well as <13 (under 13) users (unless disabled in the account's respective Parent account).

Today, the text filter is provided by the CommunitySift service. Since CommunitySift uses multiple rules and text classification techniques to filter phrases, the lists in this article are not representative of the entire range of words that are filtered. The system is a controlled neural network, which is constantly studying what users say so it can learn and evolve with the language as new bypasses and idioms are created. Errors happen frequently, but the occurrence of such has diminished over time.

Alongside filtering potential profanity from the chats, the filter also attempts to censor private information such as ages, telephone numbers and surnames, so that the website can continue to be COPPA-compliant by protecting users from unknowingly sharing their personally identifiable information.

Sometime in 2021, a new feature was added to privacy settings called "Chat Filtering Level". This determines how restricted the chat filter becomes. There are two modes of filtering, "maximum filtering" and "13+ filtering", which determines how restricted the chat filter becomes.

Criticism

False positives

The filtering system, at times, may detect false positives in sentences that could be considered otherwise acceptable. Words used in common sentences such as "can't" "hi", "ok", sometimes get picked up by the filter and get censored. The number of hits has reduced in the last years, as the filter evolved to detect what is a normal conversation and what is not, based on feedback given by Roblox Staff and by common users, although false positives still happen frequently. Those are most noticeable when searching through the avatar shop or when looking for a username.

Filtering numbers

In February 2017, <13 accounts had all forms of numbers blacklisted from being seen and sent permanently for security reasons - namely, to avoid underage users sending messages with personally identifiable information such as age, addresses and telephone numbers. This has caused quite a commotion in the Roblox community, and criticism flew around from all parts. In February 2021, the safe chat was updated with this feature being slightly removed allowing <13 accounts to be able to say numbers, but excessive use would still be filtered.[1]

Controversies about LGBTQ+

During some time, LGBTQ+ terms such as "gay", "homosexual", "lesbian", "bisexual", "transgender" and the alike were temporarily blacklisted for being a sexual term. This severely upsetted many users who identified as them. This has since been changed, and now the filter only blocks these words when used in negative connotations. Since July 1, 2021, there have been a very massive increase in reports of users being banned for up to a week for saying LGBTQ+ terms, some of the most common being "gay". This has been stated by Roblox as the filter ignoring context, but there has been evidence of this not being the case.

Censoring of search

One key fault with the filtering system is that it censors the website search. This is highly impractical as it does not show search results to anybody else but the searcher and it hinders the ability to search for stuff on roblox such as usernames.

Censoring of links

Many links like discord.gg invites, roblox.com links, and other links are often filtered. The reason this censor is here is to stop Advertising, malicious links, scams, or gore. Several users have gotten around this by giving out part of the link, instead of the whole link. For example, instead of saying "join //discord.gg/Ap3qfEvBzj", they instead say "join Ap3qfEvBzj", or something similar. However these suspicious hashes can sometimes be filtered.

Unable to change date of birth (for people who are 13+)

There have been some users above the age of 13 on Roblox with Privacy Mode on due to the user's account birthday being under the age of 13. Because of this, some people would ask Roblox Support for help to change their birthdate (due to safe chat getting in their way) to their real one (13+), but to no avail. Roblox has claimed that they could not change birthdays due to COPPA regulations. Many people have criticized Roblox for not being able to help with this age-related issue, and getting no help from Roblox Support whatsoever. Roblox may enable to change the birth date for users <13, however this may be in breach of the federal COPPA act, which regulates the ability of children to lie about their ages.

References

1. ↑ //twitter.com/Roblox_RTC/status/1364002152901988356