Roblox ban sparks protests in Russia

Protesting government policies can be a risky business in Russia, but despite those risks a Reuters report says a group of people in the Russian city of Tomsk recently braved brutal weather and the threat of reprisals to take a stand against an outrage they could not let pass: A ban on Roblox.

Russia banned Roblox earlier this month over concerns that it is "rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children," including "LGBT propaganda," which is more or less the mere acknowledgement that LGBTQ+ people exist.

But separate from its usefulness as a thin pretext for the continued repression of basic civil rights, Roblox is also a pretty popular videogame platform, and that has brought out "several dozen people" in Tomsk, a city of roughly 550,000 in central Russia. They carried signs bearing messages like "Hands off Roblox" and "Roblox is the victim of the digital Iron Curtain," according to the report: Not exactly poetry, but maybe something is lost in the translation.

The ban has also apparently sparked some debate over censorship, according to the report, and of the usefulness of bans like this one when they can be evaded with relative ease via VPNs. Naturally, there are also legitimate concerns about Roblox itself, which has historically struggled with child safety issues. In the face of growing criticism in the West, including lawsuits filed by at least three US states, the company has trumpeted various initiatives and programs aimed at reducing children's exposure to inappropriate content or online predators.

But it's also sometimes struggled to present a coherent strategy on that front: In a recent interview with the New York Times, for instance, Roblox Corporation CEO David Baszucki said the presence of predators on the platform is "not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well," and also enthused about the possibility of adding a "prediction market"—that is, gambling—to Roblox at some point in the future.

A few dozen people standing in the cold 2,900 km east of Moscow isn't likely to spur a reversal of the Russian ban on Roblox, or to garner any sort of response or reaction at all, really. But this isn't the only dissent being expressed over the Roblox ban: A Moscow Times report says Yekaterina Mizulina, an advocate of pro-Russian censorship, has received 63,000 letters from children about the ban, half of them saying they want to leave Russia because of it; the report also quotes Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for Russian president Vladirim Putin, as saying the Kremlin has received "many" letters about the ban, although whether they support or oppose it wasn't specified.