The UK Online Safety Act and What It Did to Roblox Friend Lists

What the Online Safety Act actually says

The UK Online Safety Act 2023 is a broad piece of legislation aimed at making the internet safer for children. It contains hundreds of pages of provisions, but a few specific sections matter for Roblox:

• Section 11 — "Safety duties protecting children": requires platforms accessed by minors to prevent children from encountering harmful content, including content from strangers
• Sections 12–15 — "Age-appropriate design": extends the UK's existing Age Appropriate Design Code (the "Children's Code") to mandate that platforms minimize the personal data exposed about minors by default

The combined effect: any platform accessible to UK minors must, by default, hide social information about UK accounts to reduce contact-with-strangers risks. Friend lists count as social information.

How Roblox interpreted it

Roblox's response, rolled out in late 2023 and early 2024, was conservative and uniform: rather than try to distinguish UK minors from UK adults, the platform just hid all UK accounts' friend lists from the public friends API. This is the cheaper, lower-risk compliance path. From Roblox's perspective, it means they don't have to verify ages individually — everyone in the UK gets treated the same way.

From a developer's or research tool's perspective, this means: https://friends.roblox.com/v1/users/{id}/friends returns an empty list for any UK-located account, regardless of whether the actual user has friends or wanted their list public. The same applies to the count endpoint — you can query whether the account has friends, but not who they are.

Is there a workaround?

For now, partially. You can't see through a UK account — if it's an intermediate node in a friend path, the path can't be reconstructed past it. But here's the workaround the FriendPath community came up with for starting-from-UK searches:

1. Find any of your friends who is not based in the UK (most of your friends list, statistically — the UK is about 5% of Roblox's userbase)
2. Use that friend's username as the "Your Username" field on FriendPath, instead of your own
3. Search to the target you want
4. Add +1 degree to whatever path comes back — that one extra hop is the link from you to your friend

It's not the absolute shortest path, but it's a close approximation. The shortest possible path might be shorter if a UK-based intermediate would have been valid, but since we can't see UK accounts' connections, we have to route around them.

Are there efforts to fix it?

Yes. A community-led petition on Change.org asks Roblox to give 18+ age-verified UK users the option to opt back in to public friend lists: change.org/p/revert-friend-list-restrictions-on-roblox-for-adults. There's also a DevForum thread discussing the issue: "Give 18+ verified UK users an option to make their connection list public".

The technical argument here is reasonable: the Online Safety Act is about protecting children, not adults. An 18+ verified UK adult who explicitly opts in to public friend visibility doesn't really fall under what Section 11 was meant to address. Whether Roblox chooses to implement that distinction is up to them.

What this means for FriendPath

Realistically, until Roblox carves out an opt-in for verified adults, UK accounts are invisible to any friend-graph tool, ours included. We can't fetch friend lists Roblox refuses to serve. The workaround above is the best we can offer to UK users. We've also added an automatic detection: if FriendPath sees a 0-friend response from an account that internally has friends, we surface a notice with the workaround in the search log and at the bottom of failed search results, so UK users aren't left wondering why their search isn't working.