BBC's Roblox Disinformation Chapter 3: The Roblox Amendment
Also: how easily to commit a crime under the Online Safety Bill
On the 17th of January 2023, the Online Safety Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons, advancing it to the House of Lords, where it has already undergone its first and second readings and is now in the committee stage where several amendments have been tabled.
One of these amendments was tabled by Lord Stevenson, a Labour life peer called “Application to experiential environments”. Currently, it merely defines an “experiential environment” (namely, an online service which simulates real world events and enables users to interact with one another), in addition to adding obligations for the Secretary of State to commission a review about how the Bill applies to these environments, as well as if more safeguards need to be implemented or not and considering how civil and criminal law should be applied to these worlds.
Whilst this amendment does apply to all experiential environments and the powers of the Secretary of State is rather limited in this regard, it is important to note that the one environment that has been talked about the most, even more than general terms such as “VR”, “immersive environments” and “the metaverse”; as well as more specific platforms such as Horizon Worlds (not mentioned) and VRChat (also not mentioned), is “Roblox”, usually from SNP MP Kirsty Blackman discussing about “sex dungeons” to her personal opinion of “hav[ing] an awful lot of issues” but admitting that “it can be a pretty fun place for people to spend time”. It is clear that the intention of this amendment is to try to give the Secretary of State a leash to control a collared Roblox Corporation in response to the UK media’s reactions to the Roblox platform. Especially when there were discussions in the Lords to limit the Secretary of State’s powers in other parts of the Online Safety Bill, with these responsibilities amended to be delegated to Ofcom instead, this amendment is simply unacceptable.
There are other forms of media that the UK Parliament also wishes to block. Currently, the United Kingdom is experiencing a large amount of unauthorised migration via boat across the Channel, as people seek opportunities inside the UK. This is not an image the UK Government wishes to send out to the world, and therefore before the Third Reading in the Commons, an amendment was proposed requiring search engines and user-to-user services to classify content “that may result in serious harm or death to a child while crossing the English Channel with the aim of entering the United Kingdom in a vessel unsuited or unsafe for those purposes.” in the same category as content which are inappropriate for children, requiring age verification to view. This however is fairly loosely defined leading to situations such as the following:
If you are in France, you probably should construct a boat like I have on Roblox which is clearly not suitable for this voyage and make your way to Dover, home of the white cliffs and a major port so you can be in the UK, subject to laws such as the one that I have just broken, making this post not suitable for children. Any content like this which involves potentially unsafe water vehicles and crossing the English Channel may be considered to be against this amendment.
So who cares? What if I simply ignore the Online Safety Bill? Another amendment, tabled at the same time (then withdrawn, then reproposed in the House of Lords) would mean that this would no longer be possible without significant repercussions, as officers (i.e. the CEO and similar) or senior managers would face jail time of up to 2 years for failure to enforce this part of the Online Safety Bill.
This level of punishment is unprecedented in the Western world, usually reserved for countries such as Saudi Arabia, who recently jailed Wikipedia administrators for not obeying their orders. Critics have predicted that this would lead to companies giving the task of “serving time in jail” not to the CEOs of said companies but to employees designated to take jail time for the company.
Roblox Corporation is already preparing for this inevitability, in the same way as those predictions. Back in 2021, they purchased Ceebr Limited which was associated with Code Kingdoms, an education product to teach children about coding in Minecraft and Roblox, renaming the company to Roblox UK Limited. There has been some progress in this regard with a demonstration of a product similar to Code Kingdoms in Roblox at RDC 2022.
Besides the IP acquisition, it seems that another objective of the acquisition is to provide an outlet for prosecutors in the event that Roblox is charged with an offense with the Online Safety Bill, with Mark Reinstra, an attorney and member of the Roblox legal counsel being given this responsibility as he is the only person assigned as the officer of the company, with the other active officer being Taylor Wessing Secretaries Ltd, which shares the same address as Roblox UK and provides legal services.
This raises an issue with this populist plan as not every company can afford a scapegoat to go to prison instead of one of the officers of the company, let alone the developers and maintainers who are the sole person responsible for their products not being able to use this tactic. It will make the UK a more difficult to place to start a technology company, directly juxtaposing the Secretary of State’s ambitions.
In the meantime, the BBC has finally responded to the points raised in the first article of this series, although the verb “responded” would be rather generous for the reply that they have given. You may view the response here:
Whilst I have already replied to this response, there are some gripes with the response that aren’t been addressed in the complaint I sent to the BBC regarding their first response.
As a result of Football World Cup occurring during the same time which generated a significant number of complaints, in addition to the winter holidays putting a pause to processing, the response to my initial complaint took 2 months, 2 weeks and 2 days to arrive. Whilst the delay would have been understandable given the context of the world, having to wait so long only to for the bare minimum to be done, not to mention how defensive the response was for some obviously incorrect content is simply insulting to those who pay their TV licensing fees.
There’s only one game experience left for both of us to play: advocate for the end of the Online Safety Bill and to wait.