Protesting is dangerous in public – with the risk of it escalating into a riot at any moment. Young people going to protests are always at a risk of being trampled, getting into fights with counter protesters, or police being particularly aggressive with them.
However, these risks aren’t as common with digital protesting. Like the one on a Malaysian-based Roblox server that allowed Roblox players to participate in a Pro-Palestine protest.
The server went viral on TikTok after clips of these blocky avatars flooding the screen flying their Palestine flags. Kids that banded together – on a server that was visited over 157,000 times – to protest despite not having to see each other in the streets of their nearest city at a nearby Pro-Palestine protest.
Roblox is a platform that 60 per cent of the users are aged 16 or younger. You would expect children in these age groups not to be socially aware enough to protest, but here they are proving that assumption wrong.
And it isn’t the first time it has happened.
In 2016, 2020, and now 2023/24, protests have been consistently happening in games like Roblox, Minecraft, Toontown, Club Penguin, Habbo, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Users of these gaming platforms have protested the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Black Lives Matter, and now Pro-Palestine.
There are many reasons that young people have used gaming platforms like Roblox to protest – safety, availability, parental control, governmental censorship, etc.
It also allows young people to experiment with their self-expression. They use the tools in front of them – which they normally use to play games and use them to experiment with political expression.
These digital protests are most likely the first time that these young people have protested and utilised their voice for political reasons. It gives them a chance to voice their opinions and frustrations with what they see on the news or in the world, in a safe way as well.
Young people are limited to what they are allowed to do in society. They can’t go anywhere without their parents’ permission and most parents won’t allow their children to go to protests especially if they’re under 16 years old.
But it isn’t only parents that limit what young people can do – governmental censorship can too. Depending on which country you live in, the punishment for going to a protest can range from a slap on a wrist to being killed. This limits not only young people, but also the entire population.
Platforms like Roblox allows people (not just young people) to express their frustrations in a safe environment that can’t be traced back to them since there’s an option to be anonymous.
However, there’s some drawbacks to this form of protesting.
Roblox has an existing moderation tool that censors certain words and phrases to avoid servers to get hostile.
Words like ‘Jews’, ‘Hamas’, and ‘Free Palestine’, are always censored in the Malaysian-based pro-Palestine server. Due to this moderation tool it isn’t as effective as the platform probably hoped, since trolls and users found ways around the censor by replacing letters with different characters.
‘Free Palestine’, might not be able to be used, but other phrases in the server can still be used like ‘Palestine will be free’. It could be argued that these types of censorships push young people to be creative in the way they communicate on the platform.
This is because of the platforms community guidelines and the platform wanting to provide a place for friendly debate about issues. This leads to prohibition of discussions of certain political topics.
According to Roblox, these topics range from discussing candidates running for President (particularly U.S.), or elected officials in office, political parties, and “inflammatory content related to real world border, territorial, or jurisdictional relationships.”
So according to these standards, the Malaysian-based server is allowed – if it doesn’t become ‘inflammatory’ by Roblox standards. It nearly did, when it got taken down for review in October 2023, however it eventually returned online without any comment from Roblox.
This is due to the history of Roblox of having violent activity in the past, where they had to remove a game that allowed players to fight each other while role-playing Russian or Ukraine soldiers.
Despite being safer than public protests, there’s still possibilities of these protests online being dangerous for young people. Nothing can be 100 per cent safe, especially when protesting a controversial topic where different people have drastically different opinions about.