My country is banning Roblox instead of addressing the elephant on the room and we are totally screwed

So... this is how their priorities lie, huh.

Welp, this is the first blog post that I made and well… unfortunately this one is out of “I really need to write this before I forgot about it because something important happened” moments. And I’m talking about… the Philippines banning Roblox as a whole than doing something with the plundered flood control projects.

Yeah. Real funny of them, huh?

The flood control projects

To give context on the flood control projects; the Philippines is known to have constant floods and natural disasters due to the geographical location that is surrounded by the region of an ocean where typhoons occur, usually in the second half of the year. Since then, there have been government projects that were tasked to fortify the flood control systems across the country. But despite that… nothing has improved since the last time we heard about it. I rarely tune into news except this caught my attention which was a big attention to the masses initally when it was spread around 2024. There’s a Wikipedia article that details everything about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_projects_scandal_in_the_Philippines

TLDR: they fucking lied about building the government projects and pocketed that money for their own sake.

The shooting

On August 19, 2026 at 7:45am, someone at the Ateneo de Zamboanga University started a shooting, leaving two students dead, including the perpetrator themselves. What’s worse is that the shooting was actually livestreamed with a body-worn camera, leading to clips being shared when it happened. These were quickly taken down since then. This incident left everyone in AdZU, including the families affected a shock, and declared the suspension of classes to pave way for a “Day of Mourning” for the fallen student who never deserved to be taken away this recklessly by a perpetrator. During the investigation, officials revealed that the father of the perpetrator is a Bureau of Customs officer, and the perpetrator themselves is an honor student and a “Roblox enthusiast”.

And… they insist on banning Roblox. But this is not the first time Roblox was brought into scrutiny.

Around February 2026, a planned mass shooting plot was uncovered from several teenagers by the anti-cybercrime division. Upon further investigation, it was revealed that there are foreign people instructing the teenagers on Roblox before moving to private messaging platforms, where they’re radicalized with the horrible stuff on the Internet (e.g. neo-nazism, blackpill content, gore, etc.). This prompted the Senators to push for strict monitoring of the platform, stronger protections and mandatory age verification to “prevent children from radicalization and online grooming”.

You see where their priorities lie.

They somehow forgot about the flood

I’ve heard more about the Senators stubborn about going with the ban on the platform than the flood control projects from what I observed. Like, not alot of them, even the media somehow moved on. And then the three-week monsoon struck the country with bunch of typhoons contributing to make it worse.

The result is… the country is still flooded without any noticeable improvement.

I remember going to my internship one day around last week when I was met with strong torrential rains and winds that I had to excuse to the HR that I won’t be reporting to work. And I was really close to hitting the 300 hour mark before the classes start! And I saw the clips propagating online that some sites like the Taft Avenue flooded up until the waist, traffic going on a standstill with the sudden rains, and students locked in the building because the entrance is trenched with flood as well. And other regions of Metro Manila were heavily affected by it, to the point that businesses cut off the operation time to 4:00 PM or even earlier to make sure the safety of their employees able to go home safely. Or maybe not.

None of this would happen if the projects somehow worked and whoever is in charge is not plundering the funds for the non-existent rat race on whoever gets insane amount of pesos will have their small dick not be laughed at.

But yeah, let’s ban Roblox. That’ll do them!

Age verification never works

Like, I’m being serious. The moment Roblox rolls out AV in their platform, young people still even managed to find a way to circumvent in order to qualify their account as an “Adult”. And this isn’t even enough to totally “prevent children from getting groomed”. In fact, I think that makes the situation even worse because predators can now just exploit the AV process to pretend as a minor that basically lets them go on a groom-all-you-can buffet.

And well, I’m not a huge fan of giving my biometrics to whoever is running the AV process, which is Persona. The same Persona that are willing to give their data away to motherfucking Palantir.

So… you’re left with some people not willing to do AV and quit Roblox entirely because of it, and some people fucking around with AV with makeshift solutions like using GMod models or whatever kind of magic they’re pulling off. Which, to say at least is not surprising for an outcome.

And if the ban ever happens, there’s always VPNs. Of course they’ll look into using sketchy ones just to play their favorite game. And that probably means that the government will put VPNs next to the chopping block because the youngins can’t do cold turkey on Roblox.

Where the hell have I seen this before… oh wait, the United Kingdom. Right.

And it’s never the violent games, for fuck sake

My parents literally said that this is the fault of the perpetrator’s parents.

That’s it. THAT’S LITERALLY IT.

Even though I kinda despise them from time to time, at the very least they were aware that it’s not the video games but the fault of the parents who couldn’t even bother to put up the parental controls that Roblox or their devices already have built-in, leaving the Internet to “take care” of their child instead of just simply talking how’s their day going, and having the firearms easily accessible.

And with the insanely tribalistic discourse on the Internet circulating, of-fucking-course there will be some millenials that are full on support on censorship to “protect the kids” than doing something that could’ve been easily preventable.

There are studies that pixels on the screen doesn’t even affect the behavior of someone, but rather it is because that in cases like these happen, it’s mostly due to their mental headspace not in the right condition, radicalization, or even… actually I gave up elaborating that part. But you get the idea. And the “sane” response from the pro-censorship, antishippers and “morally pure” tourists from longstanding Internet communites is that, “well, fiction affects reality”!

…ampota naman.

Is there any hope on this? Or I don’t know, I’m actually tired, man

With the rising trend of censorship in the Internet, I don’t think Tim-Berners Lee would be happy to see their creation turned into a hellscape. And with the Philippines government still not giving a fuck since the Duterte administration…

…eh.

All I can say is: this is a cautionary tale on many things:

what happens when you let boomers without prior knowledge to technology makes decisions on something that’s preventable
what happens when you follow a belief from someone at the Internet without the long-term consequences (cough, COUGH, TikTok and their misinformation with the term “proship”)
what happens when you let the Internet be your child’s nanny because “it’s convenient”
what happens when corruption still persists and the fuckers who voted for it still complain that they reaped the consequences
what happens… actually I’m just gonna stop.

But like, I don’t want to end this with a defeatist end, y’know?

I literally writed this on a whim to let things out on my chest that I was internally saying for several months, so… as far as I know, all of what I predicted is now happening.

Though thankfully, I still have acquintances and friends who share the same principles as me, as it feels like it’s more than ever important to speak up on issues that might pose harm to the netizens but also real, living beings as well.

Though y’all better be cautious from now and then, because things from there might be getting bad. But it’s not too late to like, keep vocal about things that actually matter. And it doesn’t hurt to speak, too.