The massive gaming website, Roblox, has now had multiple lawsuits levied against it in regards to recent events involving child predators on their user platform. Roblox is a website where any person—child or adult—can create an account and play user-made games, which Roblox itself calls “experiences.” These experiences can be created by anyone who uses the free Roblox Studio, enabling many kids to pursue a hobby that teaches them how to create video games; however, this comes with its own drawbacks, as it allows anyone to create anything. Many users create Roblox experiences that are tailored to draw in younger audiences, allowing bad actors the opportunity to prey on younger players.
Due to how significantly the problem has grown over the past few years, many Roblox YouTubers, such as Schlep, have created projects where they work with police to catch predators who plan to meet up with underage children. Most people would consider this a very noble service, especially those who know Schlep was a victim of grooming through Roblox when he was younger. Now an adult, he works against these criminals and puts them behind bars, giving all the incriminating evidence he has collected to law enforcement. Unfortunately for Schlep, Roblox did not appreciate this and sent him a cease-and-desist letter and banned him from the platform. After receiving a lot of public backlash for this decision, Roblox released an official statement earlier in Aug. that addressed how they handled the “vigilantes” on the Roblox platform. One part of their account stated, “While seemingly well-intentioned, the vigilantes we’ve banned have taken actions that are both unacceptable and create an unsafe environment for users.” This talking point from their official website sat quite unwell with a lot of people, because a lot of the arguments that Roblox gave were viewed as hypocritical in nature.
After their response garnered national attention, Roblox was served with a lawsuit from the state of Louisiana as a result of the visible lack of security and safety protections. The suit was filed by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill. Her given reason for the suit was that Roblox holds its profits and revenue in higher regard than the safety of children. On the Roblox website, any user under the age of 13 is unable to send messages or chat outside of games unless they have explicit parental permission; while that seems to be a good safeguard, older users are still able to lie about their age and deceive younger users. Only a few months ago, after the entire debacle started, did Roblox create a system to verify the age of users aged 13 to 17, along with an artificial intelligence system to view and check messages that human moderators cannot get to. Although these changes seem good enough, many have complained about them, enough to have another lawsuit filed against them on Oct. 7, this time from the Attorney General of Kentucky, Russell Coleman. Coleman cited similar reasons to Murrill, stating that what Roblox is doing is “creating a hunting ground for child predators.”
As a platform, Roblox is valued at roughly $41 billion with 380 million active users a month. Roblox profits from all user interactions and purchases, which includes the illicit and illegal interactions that child predators partake in. Due to this, Coleman asserted that Roblox willingly ignored the illegal activity happening, just so that they could profit from the criminal activity that they themselves facilitate.
Roblox recently released a new statement on their website addressing the multitude of allegations that have been put against them. The statement supports the stance that Roblox is always adapting to the new techniques used by online predators, and that many of the safety options online have parental input as part of the equation. However, these claims may be too good to be true, as many people who have interacted with Roblox can testify against these statements. Before he was banned from the Roblox platform, Schlep had a plethora of accounts he found in violation of Roblox’s terms of service. He regularly reported them, and outside of Roblox, would message and alert the moderation team on other platforms such as X. Often, Schlep found that Roblox never acted against these accounts, going directly against their claim made at the end of their statement, “We aim to create one of the safest online environments for users.” While this statement was aimed at the claims received from backlash online, Roblox has so far given no statement on the pending lawsuits against it.