Why banning Roblox won’t save our schools
There used to be a comforting, if naive, belief that mass school shootings were a strictly Western tragedy—something we only watched on international news. But the events of the last few months have violently shattered that illusion.
In June, a shooting at a public high school in Tacloban left three students dead and around 20 injured. In August, a student in Zamboanga livestreamed himself shooting a classmate before taking his own life. And just days ago, a 16-year-old Grade 9 student at Banga National High School in South Cotabato brought his father’s 9-mm pistol to class. After joking with friends about “executing my plan,” he shot 10 students, killing two, before turning the weapon on himself.
The crisis is undeniably here. But what is equally alarming is how our leadership is choosing to handle it.
Instead of unpacking the complex, ugly web of youth mental health, gun access, and digital extremism, the immediate reflex of the government is to default to our favorite national governance strategy: puro pagbabawal (banning everything). Following the Zamboanga incident, Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla pushed for a total ban on the gaming platform Roblox, arguing it desensitizes children to violence. In the wake of the Banga shooting, he reiterated plans to meet with the Department of Information and Communication Technology and Congress to push for legislation limiting minors’ access to social media entirely.
This is a classic knee-jerk reaction. Banning a platform because bad actors exploit its dark corners is a lazy legislative shortcut.
I have a nephew in his first year of high school at the Ateneo de Manila University. Like millions of kids his age, he plays Roblox and regularly hits me up for Robux. When I asked him about the government’s push to ban the game, he immediately disagreed. He plays for fun, builds digital worlds, and isn’t lurking in group chats that promote violence. To him, and to most of his peers, Roblox is just a digital playground. Banning it doesn’t solve the underlying problem; it merely forces the behavior into another unmonitored corner of the internet.
In my years leading product operations and platform lifecycles across tech ecosystems in Southeast Asia, I’ve seen exactly how these digital environments operate. Platforms like Roblox, Discord, and Reddit are essentially neutral infrastructure. The real danger isn’t the code itself; it’s the unchecked algorithmic rabbit holes and niche spaces—like the True Crime Communities the Banga shooter reportedly engaged with online—that exploit vulnerable youth. We don’t need a blanket ban; we need strategic regulation. The government should focus on enforcing age-restricted access for minors and holding tech companies accountable for strict moderation policies, rather than shutting the door on the digital ecosystem entirely.
More crucially, we need to address the glaring physical failures that allow a tragedy like this to happen in the first place. How does a 16-year-old easily access a loaded 9-mm pistol and carry two magazines into a classroom? South Cotabato Governor Reynaldo Tamayo Jr. stated it plainly: “We need to be responsible in storing firearms. Gun owners, in particular, must make sure that minors do not have access to them.” The priority shouldn’t be hunting down video games. It should be fortifying school security protocols and enforcing uncompromising gun storage laws so that a teenager cannot seamlessly transition from a depressive spiral to a mass casualty event.
And then there is the uncomfortable truth we need to confront in our own living rooms: parental neglect.
We are living in an era of digital neglect. Parents frequently use smartphones and tablets as digital pacifiers, only to act shocked when their children navigate the darkest, most nihilistic corners of the web completely unsupervised.
Psychiatrist Dr. Randy Dellosa recently framed the issue perfectly on national TV, noting that we cannot be parents from our own generation. We have to grow up alongside our Gen Z and Gen Alpha children, which means monitoring their devices with subtlety and understanding rather than just acting as the digital police.
Dellosa’s diagnosis hits the nail on the head. You cannot outsource your child’s moral compass to a government firewall. True parenting in the digital age requires active, emotional presence. It means taking the time to understand the media they consume, rather than just unplugging the router when a tragedy makes the evening news.
To our lawmakers: drop the ban-everything legislation. Secure our physical campuses, strengthen our gun laws, and regulate digital access thoughtfully. And to the parents raising this new generation: step up. Your active presence is the only real deterrent your child has against an unfiltered world. If we continue to rely on lazy bans to mask our systemic failures, we are actively setting up our youth for tragedies far worse than a disconnected server.
Paulo Oscuro is a product operations and growth lead with over a decade of experience scaling tech ecosystems across Southeast Asia and Europe.
