Would be pretty silly if roblox lost a lawsuit for letting someone else exploit children through their platform.
Just to clarify:. I am not saying that it would be silly if roblox lost this particular lawsuit but rather the possibility that the law holds negligence to be somehow worse than the direct exploitation of children that Roblox openly participates in through their less-than savory user-created content store
The details of the case are a bit more complicated, but essentially the TL;DR is that the kid was autistic and the parents were under the impression (based on Roblox’s advertising) that his account was locked down to only be able to talk to kids his own age. The adult perpetrator was pretending to be another boy the victim’s age. The part which seems kind of weird legally is that the actual abuse occurred on Discord, after they moved to that platform from Roblox.
Personally IDK how much responsibility we should say Roblox has. I think our culture has a major problem with no longer fearing the Internet. When I was a kid it was taken for granted that if you let your kid use the Internet unsupervised there were pedophiles waiting around every corner. That hasn’t changed, but both parents and companies have seemingly just forgotten about it. I think it’s kind of insane that Roblox is allowed to act like they can prevent your kids from talking to adults when that is obviously false. I also think it’s kind of insane to believe them.
The situation is tragic. I read a longer article about it and just felt bad for the parents and the victim. They really were trying to do the right thing, and they tried to cut their kid off from online games when they found out about all this but again he was autistic and it was one of the only things that could calm him down. It has got to be tough being a parent these days.
I’m not saying that I think roblox should be protected from a lawsuit, I made a bad joke about how roblox exploited child labor with their outrageous percentages on their store (I have no idea if that still happens because I’m perpetually ~10 years behind everything in pop culture)
They’re well known for doing fuckall about it and banning anyone who attempts to report such activities to police, the CEO’s deffo gotta be put on some kinda list man, some weirdass bookey guy. He tried making a 17+ dating app integrated with roblox, yk a kid’s game played by mostly 7 y/o’s.
Roblox fights parents trying to prevent abuse. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/roblox-defends-banning-vigilante-users-as-criticism-over-child-safety-grows/ar-AA1Kxxzn
I mean they practically encourage it
I think I worded that poorly; Roblox is infamous for exploiting the labor of children, in the form of user-created content, to generate a shitton of money on their store by taking a (rather large) percentage of the sales.
Roblox said it is designed with “rigorous built in safety features” and is “continually innovating new safety features — over 100 this year alone — that protect our users and empower parents and caregivers with greater control and visibility.”
The fact that they are framing it in this manner “100 features in this year alone” (what does this even mean?) suggests that they don’t care.
If you could pump out 100 features in 1 year, how little were they doing before??
The parental options don’t do a fucking thing. The game’s predatory by design (in every meaning of the word)…
“No one in the history of games has cared this much!”
But now they know blatant bullshit lies generally work pretty well on our population so expect more of this crap.
I couldn’t even name a hundred safety features. Ten would be enough. Age gate, parental controls, moderators, a report function… What more does it need?
Somehow we had second life before Roblox and as bad as some places there got it still was never as awful as Roblox.
I imagine it’s because Second Life was never popular with children.
As bad as mostly-adult spaces can be, the worst kinds of humans seem to skitter around children’s spaces.
SL was too complicated when I was a kid. Might be different now, but a lot of us went onto IMVU instead. It originally had no separation for over and under 18 accounts, but even after they added it you had both kids and adults blatantly intermingling anyways. You couldn’t search up over 18 rooms as under 18 or search under 18 rooms as over 18, but people could still invite and chat.
Nothing quite like being 15 and hanging out with your friends until one of them invites their mid-twenties boyfriend to the chat.
Roblox should be sued for alot of things, this is one of them.
Roblox does not seem to care what they do as long as it makes money. This seems like a huge problem.
Discord on the other hand… I honestly don’t care if they go out of business, I really don’t like that platform. But how did they have any responsibility in this matter?
It argues that if Roblox and Discord had taken steps to screen users before allowing them on apps, or implemented age and identity verification and other safety measures, “Ethan would have never interacted with this predator, never suffered the harm that he did, and never died by suicide.”
They want these sites to screen every users ID on sign up. I’m sure the courts will love another, “for the children” security bill.
Discord has been taking down free bot systems that people have created to cross check user history and keep them away from minors by banning them from all servers that subscribe to the service. It was entirely opt in and discord obviously doesn’t care that people are groomed they are in fact facilitating in and blocking any organized efforts to stop predators.
The actual abuse occurred on Discord after the child was groomed on Roblox.
Yeah, my point is that it is just a communication tool. I wouldn’t expect them, or want them, to monitor that. If they had been phone calls would they be going after the phone company? If it had been letters would they go after the postal service?
I can’t see blaming them. Whereas I can see how you can blame roblocks as it is marketed to children with the pretense that there are safeguards.
Grooming allegations notwithstanding, Roblox itself reminds me of those generic games you’d see a character playing in some TV show.
I think the same about the story of seasons games.
I don’t think screening is the answer, but with Roblox and Discord, the follow-up on reports of predators is lacking and should be punished severely by the courts. I don’t care if your profits go down a percentage point or two, you need to improve your product.
Will be settled out of court.
This is like suing the phone company over phone calls. Sorry but the man involved was responsible, not the communication mediums.
Roblox is literally actively shutting down anti-pedophilia efforts.
There’s a difference between
“A pedophile committed a crime in my house (but I had nothing to do with it).”
and
“Gee, the pedophiles seem to think my house is a great place to do crime, because they keep doing it, but that’s none of my business.”
Dense af man.
