Back when I was a child during the administration of Rodrigo Duterte, I remember watching the news as a child. The news program flashed the same things I’ve already heard the previous days—another death, another update on the war against drugs, another statement about it. During that moment, what my mother said to me was so iconic.
“Walang lesser evils sa mundo, mga evils lang na kailangan natin tanggapin.”
Years later, the sentiment of it still remains, albeit in a different headline. The government is currently considering banning Roblox, an online gaming platform, over child safety concerns, citing cases of exploitation, scams, and exposure to harmful content. Officials have framed it as a last resort, that this is a necessary move to protect minors in a platform that connects many communities beyond their control, but it only feels like they act only what’s easier to control, not the most harmful.
The issue here is not whether Roblox is dangerous. A platform built on user interaction using anonymous accounts will inevitably create spaces where danger can lurk. The problem is how that danger is being isolated, as if it is the only platform that Filipinos interact with on a daily basis.
Because beyond Roblox, more direct harmful sites remain widely accessible. Take for example, online gambling. Their platforms have only continued to expand their reach, landmarked by the constant advertising and influencers promoting it, making it a normalized thing that people and children alike interact on a regular basis. The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) reported that more than half or P53 billion of PAGCOR’s gaming revenues came from electronic and online gaming activities, including eGames and eBingo, further deepening the truth that it is becoming more and more accessible by people.
On a more pressing issue, pornographic materials still continue to be accessible to anybody. Just open up an incognito tab, type in anything related to it, bam. Hundreds of sites, all with measures that will ask the age of the user but will not verify that said user is considered as an adult.
While the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) has blocked thousands of sites across the year, Virtual Private Network (VPN) usage and mirror sites replicate taken down sites after then they are removed. The records may show action, but the outcome is largely unchanged.
These are not smaller problems. If anything, it only shows that these problems are more embedded and systematic than ever. The question is not whether Roblox deserves scrutiny, because it does. The question is why the scrutiny concentrates on a problem while others continue to become normalized and operate with less urgency to fix them.
This is where my mother’s point comes back, clearer than ever. What it is doing now is exactly what she warned about—treating harm as something that can be sorted and managed. A gaming platform like Roblox becomes urgent because its dangers are visible and easy to act on. Gambling is normalized because it brings in money. Pornography is tolerated because it is harder to control. But none of these are lesser problems. They are simply treated differently from one another, categorized by how much they can solve it.
The result is a digital double standard. One space is treated as urgent, while others are treated as manageable. But if the principle is safety, then it cannot be selective. The risks posed by gambling addiction, exposure to explicit content, or financial scams are not lesser simply because they are familiar or harder to regulate.
If there are no lesser evils, then the real issue is not just the potential banning of Roblox. It is the inconsistency in how harm is confronted across the digital landscape. Until regulation addresses problems such as online gambling and pornography with the same clarity and intensity, the system will continue to act on what is easiest to control, while everything else remains something we simply learn to tolerate.
