How Political Expression is Taking Place in Virtual Worlds: The Case of Roblox

With more than 111.8 million daily active users worldwide, Roblox is the main virtual world platform by number of users. Although the platform policies explicitly ban political content, content with political references (to political figures, entities, ideologies) is prevalent and easy to locate. That makes Roblox an ideal case to study how new immersive virtual worlds enable emergent new modes of political participation and politically oriented narratives. In particular, given that the majority of users are children and teenagers, the study of political content in Roblox can help expand current knowledge on how emergent media technologies shape youth political participation and expression. In this work-in-progress paper, we intend to present an ongoing digital ethnography in Roblox. Particularly, we present the iterative creation of a dataset with political content which reveals different ways of political expression including prosocial behaviors such as protests as well as extremist violent hate speech. From an Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) perspective, this approach offers an opportunity to explore how IDN might incorporate political content and spark political participation among children, teens, and youth. To achieve this aim, we draw on the IDN literature to address and represent complex societal issues (Koenitz, Barbara & Eladhari, 2022) as well as political internet games (Neys & Jansz, 2010), and political participation (Durotoye et al., 2025; Vaccari and Valeriani, 2021).