"When a Filipino child may be a victim of grooming or online sexual abuse, every hour matters. Our authorities need to know immediately whom they should approach." That was Senator Risa Hontiveros' message to Roblox executives who met with her at the Senate this week — and her specific ask was concrete: name a legal representative based in the Philippines.
Roblox, for its part, signaled it is open to the idea. BusinessMirror reports that the company told lawmakers it already maintains coordination channels with Philippine law enforcement and is willing to appoint a qualified third party as its local representative.
What the SAGIP Bata Act would require
The requirement Hontiveros is pressing for comes from the pending SAGIP Bata Act, the strengthened version of Republic Act 11930, the Anti-OSAEC and Anti-CSAEM Act of 2022 (OSAEC stands for online sexual abuse or exploitation of children). Under the measure, online platforms operating in the country would have to designate a Philippine-based legal representative authorized to receive subpoenas, takedown orders, blocking directives, requests for account information, and other lawful directives directly from Philippine authorities.
The point is speed. Today, requests to foreign platforms can route through distant corporate entities, adding delay in cases where investigators are trying to identify or protect a child. A locally reachable representative would give police, prosecutors, and courts a single, accountable point of contact.
Hontiveros, who chairs the Senate Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality, welcomed the company's stance while making clear the goal is a rule, not a favor. "We appreciate Roblox's openness. Our goal is to build on that cooperation and make it reliable across platforms, and not dependent on informal or individual arrangements," she said, per Journal News Online.
Roblox is already deep in the Philippines' child-safety push
This meeting is not Roblox's first engagement with Philippine authorities. In late August, the company committed to exploring PhilSys-based age checks, an NBI liaison officer, and a Philippine office by October after regulators raised alarms about child safety on the platform. That followed the DILG flagging grooming chats on Roblox targeting minors, with the DICT naming Discord as its next child-safety focus.
The pressure is not limited to Roblox. The same week as the Senate meeting, the House kept its freeze on the DICT's 2027 budget over unresolved child-safety issues with Facebook, and lawmakers have summoned Meta executives over harmful content. Platform accountability — specifically, making global platforms answerable to Philippine legal process — has become one of the most active tech-policy fronts in the country this year.
The Senate meeting also comes shortly after Roblox's own developer conference, where the company unveiled standalone apps, in-browser Chrome play, and a real-money creator wallet. Its new AI creation tools have already been used to publish around 9,000 games, 71 percent of them by first-time creators. A platform expanding that quickly — into real-money features and AI-generated content at once — is exactly the kind of moving target lawmakers say needs a formal, locally reachable point of accountability rather than case-by-case goodwill.
Why this matters for Filipino families
Roblox is one of the most widely played platforms among Filipino children, which is exactly why it keeps landing at the center of these hearings. If the SAGIP Bata Act passes with the legal-representative requirement intact, the change would be structural: takedown and account-information requests in suspected grooming or exploitation cases could be served locally and acted on faster, and the same obligation would apply to every covered platform, not just the ones that choose to cooperate. For now, Roblox's commitment is an expression of openness rather than a binding appointment — the bill itself is still pending in the legislature, and no representative has yet been named.
