The County of Los Angeles filed suit today against social media gaming platform Roblox alleging that the platform failed to protect children from predatory behavior. The lawsuit alleges that while Roblox markets itself as a safe digital space for creativity, it is in reality an unsafe online environment that has become a breeding ground for predators.
The parasite predator class
OK, and Discord, Facebook, etc? Or do they just lobby better?
The difference is Discord and Facebook don’t allow users under 13. Roblox does
About the only internet consumer protections that exist in the US are for under-13
Most games are games with a chat feature.
ROBLOX IS A CHATROOM WITH A GAMES FEATURE.
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It’s a chatroom where 60% of the user base is under the age of 16 and 40% is under 12.
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Grooming happens on Roblox. Predators move that conversation to places Discord which is where the crimes happen.
I am an adult who helped a kid that was the victim of online predators.
When talking to your kids about online safety, come up with a plan just like you might for a fire. Make sure they know what to do when something makes them uncomfortable and make sure you identify a 3rd party adult that you trust and your kid feels safe talking to, maybe a close family friend or an aunt/uncle.
That last part is how I got involved. I don’t have my own kids, but I knew a kid that felt more comfortable talking to me about that stuff than to his parents.
That last part is how I got involved. I don’t have my own kids, but I knew a kid that felt more comfortable talking to me about that stuff than to his parents.
doing this is probably an effective safety feature for any community to have. if you’re afraid your parents will freak out and ban you from electronics forever you won’t go to them for help. and not all parents are good parents.
Likewise I’m a “safe third party adult” for my niece but the prospect of ever actually needing to act in that capacity is terrifying.
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As much as I think this is all terrible and that Roblox SHOULD answer for some of this shit, the fact of the matter is, PARENTS ARE NOT TEACHING KIDS HOW TO BE SAFE IN THE INTERNET. They just throw a fucking tablet or phone or console or PC screen in front of their eyes and refuse to do ANYTHING resembling parenting, and when their kid inevitably gets groomed they blame the platform and ask for daddy government to do their parenting for them and ask for things like age verification, which at least on Discord is literally being used to profile people criticizing the Trump administration and ICE.
Set parental controls, teach kids to not trust strangers and give them basic internet safety tips, and none of this shit will ever happen. Don’t sign away the rights of other adults because you’re a terrible fucking parent.
Yeah, agree with everything you said. I let my kids play Roblox. I play with them sometimes, been playing some silly Shawarma game, it freaks them out.
So far, the biggest thing we talk about is this desire of every game to enter your wallet, and I tell them that a game shouldn’t be asking you for money, and now they both get annoyed at games that ask for money. I like to think I’ve created a safe environment for them to play in, and when the environment becomes something else, they ask me about it.
So mainly right now the worst that happens is the game is bullshit and they get mad, and I say hey, this game is bullshit (in more PG language), and we move on.
I firmly believe that prohibition just leads to curiosity. I think it’s impossible to insulate them from shit these days, so I’ll be part of their exposure, and hopefully I can help them learn.
Social media has muddied the water since I was a kid but I was raw dogging the Internet mostly unsupervised since I was in 5th grade and ran into all sorts of shit. Knowing not to give up any personal information about myself was all I really needed to feel safe. It was never something I even considered doing. I still don’t have any social media with my identity other than a very outdated and minimal LinkedIn. Not sure how a kid could take that advice seriously from their parents who’ve been blasting anything and everything about them all over social media since they were born though.
PARENTS ARE NOT TEACHING KIDS
Unfortunately, it always has been like this for everything
[Sad astronaut gun meme]
Facts. Feels good to subsidize parents and have their shitty kids be the reasons to take my rights.
Set parental controls
This is what they are suing about.
Don’t sign away the rights of other adults
What rights do you think are being “signed away” in this lawsuit about Roblox not providing functional parental controls and moderation?
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually happening here.
Probably talking about invasive shit like what discord just did.
Which they are already doing in the shittiest way possible, and is only a small part of the problem the lawsuit notes.
Which is why I’ve been asking, they can’t answer because they dont know what they are talking about, they are concerned about a single (almost tangential) element of the problem - which Roblox already is doing, and only because they keep getting sued for catering to predators.
Because those parents are pushing for age verification stuff, that has already been confirmed by hackers to be sent straight to the DOJ and ICE to make a database and link people’s internet profiles to their real names. With possibly the intention to either arrest people for criticizing ICE, or deporting people they DEEM to be illegals.
Thats not the only means of age verification.
Do you know how they are doing verification currently? Because I bet you won’t like it.
Mandatory facial verification, processed by AI. This was the response made by Roblox to them being sued over having nonfunctional controls for parents, and doing nothing about the predators on their platform.
So I’ll ask again - what rights do you think are being taken away here?
Edit: Just going to add this bit here.
Tech journalist and former CNET senior writer Casey Newton asked what Baszucki (CEO) thinks of the “problem of predators” on the platform
The response:
We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.
This is not an “age verification” thing. This is a platform catering to predators.
Did you not read the Twitter thread? The facial verification is done by OpenAI and shared with Palantir, the DOJ, and ICE. Yes, including Roblox’s. What makes you think the DOJ would NOT try to build a profile on someone going through age verification who’s brown enough to be considered an “illegal” and possibly detain or deport them if they criticize ICE?
Did you not read the part where I pointed out that it was Roblox who implemented that by choice?
That this is how Roblox decided to try and avoid lawsuits for catering to predators?
That these measures, as noted in the suit, do absolutely nothing and are easily defeated?
That the issue goes far beyond their own decision to implement this form of age verification?
I have the same question and you still have not answered, youre answering a question that I didnt ask that is unrelated.
What rights are being signed away by this lawsuit?
Edit: about/avoid autocorrect shenanigans.
Calling Roblox’s actions voluntary is misleading to the point of maliciousness.
They did it to avoid suits, which is what I said.
Suggesting its anything other than avoiding consequences (to their profits) is misleading to the point of maliciousness.
Parents’ refusal to parent is why regulation is essential.
You’re not allowed to take someone else’s rights because someone else is a fucking irresponsible idiot. That’s not how this works.
People made that exact same argument over seat belt laws. The only difference now is that the car crashes are happening digitally.
Seat belts are different because if someone is in a car is not wearing one and carrying passengers, that person will become a 200 pound pinball in case of a crash and crush everyone else to death. Do YOU want to sign away your ability to criticize Trump and ICE because some dipshit parent didn’t do what they’re supposed to fucking do and got their kid groomed?
Seat belts are different because if someone is in a car is not wearing one and carrying passengers, that person will become a 200 pound pinball in case of a crash and crush everyone else to death.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t read up on how social media algorithms work, nor their effects on people’s cognitive abilities. Have you seen the photos of parents with their dead kids at the various court hearings lately?
Do YOU want to sign away your ability to criticize Trump and ICE because some dipshit parent didn’t do what they’re supposed to fucking do and got their kid groomed?
Slippery slope fallacy. We use ID to regulate all manner of things here in the US, and I’m still able to obtain them. And yes, given the gravity of the harm being caused to young people by social media, I’m happy to provide my ID in order to lock them out of it until they’re adults, at least until a better and easier solution to the problem materializes.
It’s not a fallacy, you fucking idiot, IT IS LITERAL FUCKING REALITY. They got fucking CAUGHT RED HANDED by a bunch of hackers using OpenAI to give the IDs from Discord to ICE, to either silence critics or kidnap more people.
Get your head out of the damn sand. You’re not helping. Every single attempt to age check is the government simply trying to tie your online identity to your real identity to punish you eventually, and this administration does not give a rat’s ass about the constitution. At some point they WILL attempt to arrest or deport people for online speech.
Since the chat update released in January, communication in Roblox is a big mess. AI wrongly detects adults as children and vice versa, the only 100% safe way is through ID. Plus, there are kids asking their parents to verify for them. A lot of players are in the wrong age group, so you don’t really know how old are the people you’re talking to. Ironically, all of this pushes more players to use messaging apps like Discord –where you can chat with fewer restrictions, excellent for predators– instead of the native chat. But you can still enjoy games peacefully if you never talk or prefer single player experiences.
Roblox literally monetized unsupervised access to children as a premium feature.
“What if we took Club Penguin but made it easy for pedos to communicate with children?” - David Baszucki, probably
multimillion dollar
They had a gross profit last year of 3.8 billion. They don’t give a shit about this.
They protect pedophiles, one youtuber was getting in touch with them and would then forward their information to the police and Roblox banned him, so fuck Roblox.
Can’t interfere with that revenue growth
Shareholders need to be held accountable for the unethical, immoral and illegal activities of their owned businesses. Until there is a financial incentive for business to be run ethically, morally and legally for the shareholders, nothing will ever change. It is perhaps the biggest problem with capitalism today.
Fiduciary duty is just white-collar-washed sociopathy.
Free schlep
Who do you think spends money on roblox? Kids? Fuck no, it’s the pedos and their totally “E for everyone”
gamesexperiences and cosmetics
This and the lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, and others are inevitable.
In the absence of essential government regulation, even in the face of significant adverse consequences for young people and their welfare, civil lawsuits will have to be enough to force these shitty companies to act appropriately.
While I do believe Roblox has been doing a terrible job handling reports of predators on it’s platform and the fact that they would rather silence reporters than dealing with the reports is completely abhorrent and inexcusable. I do believe that the responsibility isn’t entirely on them.
Roblox isn’t a daycare. It isn’t a school. It isn’t marketed to have any responsible adults online per number of players.
Honestly, what is the solution that this lawsuit aims to enforce? Paid moderators with complete criminal background checks to be responsible for 10 underage players each? Who’s going to pay for this?
All that said would I allow my children to play Roblox unsupervised? No. Which is a shame as many of the available games are fantastic and my friends children really enjoy playing them. That said supervison can literally be myself glancing over every now and then to see what type of game they are playing and if they are interacting with anyone, really low tier, low effort parenting skills if you know what to look out for.
Roblox isn’t a daycare. It isn’t a school. It isn’t marketed to have any responsible adults online per number of players.
But it’s a platform marketed towards children, takes a cut of the shovelware that other kids make, and didn’t bother policing their platform seriously until recently. The fact that it’s a kids game that’s marketed to kids and they go after people reporting on the abuses that they let run rampant on their platform is just mental to me. I really hope Roblox gets taken to the cleaners for how they actively have fucked around and let their platform get to where it is.
It’s this type of thinking that is pushing the “but the kids” rhetoric seemingly world wide.
We either have a free, open and anonymous internet… or a dystopian identity-required-at-every-point-of-access, heavily moderated, hellscape.
The internet isn’t a daycare, the parents should be playing with them or close by at all times.
We either have a free, open and anonymous internet… or a dystopian identity-required-at-every-point-of-access, heavily moderated, hellscape.
Is your argument that kids spaces should be free and open spaces, because the only alternative is everything has to be age gated? If not, feel free to expand on what this has anything to do with how a service advertised to kids shouldn’t be treated differently than non kid-oriented services.
Internet is not a daycare. You are correct.
BUT ROBLOX MARKETED ITSELF AS BEING FOR KIDS. ROBLOX SAID THEY WERE FOR KIDS. YOUNG KIDS. ROBLOX SAID THIS.
You can repeat your daycare line all you want, but that line has nothing to do with what Roblox claimed they were. Your scenario has no place here, since you are not even in the same ballpark or planet as Roblox.
I think the point he’s trying to make is that parents are not teaching kids to be safe in the internet and instead are asking for daddy government to do their parenting for them, without being aware that what they’re doing is signing away the rights of LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE to criticize the government in the future without getting put on a fucking list (Discord’s age verification literally sends your info to Palantir and Peter Thiel and profiles the person, especially if they’re avid Trump or ICE critics). There were plenty of platforms for kids back in the day, they all had this problem (somewhat), but it was nowhere near as concerning as before because the kids in the 2000’s were warned multiple times by their parents to exercise caution when using the internet.
Teaching kids to be responsible about their online activities is good, but it can’t be the only solution. Just like teaching women to be wary of men can’t be the only solution to stop date rape. (Also, making the victims responsible for stopping their own victimization doesn’t really work anyway, particularly when it comes to kids. It just saddles them with tons of guilt if they fail to stop it, which can be used to keep the abuse going)
I don’t see why it’s such a problem to have billion-dollar sites aimed toward kids being required to hire adequate moderation if they have social services available. No age checks needed, no verifications or anything, just clear and very strict rules (because again, this is aimed at kids, if adults want to use it they can conform to the kid rules or gtfo) that get enforced across the board.
That could work but I dunno if Roblox would even want to put on the effort (given that they banned a man exposing pedophiles in the platform), and also having moderators means they ARE a point of failure since there could be a groomer amongst them who just happens to not have criminal records. However, trying to childproof the internet in response to things like this is beyond stupid.
If they don’t want to put forth the effort, they they should be fined until they shutter.
I will repeat it. Roblox is not a daycare. If you want your kids to go online and play games, then supervise them.
Sorry but the ipad isn’t a fucking pacifier. If you want to leave your children unhindered on the internet, Roblox or whatever, then that’s on you. If you aren’t looking after your child’s well-being, then don’t expect some game to do that for you.
The mental gymnastics people put to place the blame firmly on online games is maddening. I expect those who disagree also let their kids run around the supermarket unsupervised.
This lawsuit makes me feel extremely validated in my fight with my ex about not letting our kid play roblox unsupervised. Same with letting them use tiktok/youtube.
I think there is a case to be made that platforms need to employ a certain ratio of background-checked moderators if the users are potentially vulnerable.
This is the law irl in classrooms etc. So what if your platform is “too large”, that’s your lookout. And it’s why we don’t fill stadiums full of unsupervised children.
And it’s why we don’t fill stadiums full of unsupervised children.
Bad analogy.
I want stats. I mean, even if it’s only one predator and means saving even only one kid, you could still argue in favor of protections; but stuff like þis is always presented as if it’s an epidemic, and measures should be proportional to þhe problem.
How frequent is abuse? How many Roblox-playing kids are abused every year? I honestly have no idea, but am suspicious of movements which þrow a bunch of stats around
As of late October 2025, the company has reported over 151 million daily active users, and over 380 million monthly users, and it is one of the largest children’s gaming platforms in the world. Over 40 percent of users are reported to be under the age of 13, and according to the company’s own surveys, nearly 75 percent of all children within the U.S. between the ages 9 to 12 play Roblox regularly.
but conspicuously omit any stat about how much abuse is happening. It smacks of fear-mongering.
Not using actual letters is dumb.
Have parents tried parenting their kids instead of expecting everyone else to do it for them?
As someone without kid, this is too easy of a defense. And if you truly think about it for more than 5 minutes, or watch any documentary on how pedophiles operate, you’d realize.
I have a kid who thinks roblox… I’m sorry, who knows roblox is slop because I taught him about it and he’s seen poor behavior from friends from playing it.
It should be a combo of both individual patenting and regulations. Ideally
This requires a technological literacy level we cannot assume everybody has, tho. And the issue is that those pedo fucks are as smart as they are evil. They share books on how to groom and abuse kids. It’s is fucking wild.
That would require them to actually think at all, it makes much more sense to expect the parent to monitor the child’s activity constantly and never let them do anything on the Internet unsupervised. They will also then complain years later about helicopter parents not giving them any freedom
You’re setting up a false dichotomy, don’t you think?
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Never let your kids play age-appropriate online games, which Roblox ostensibly falls under – risk forming lifelong resentment as kids forfeit social capital upon exclusion from peers
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Let the kids play, but insert yourself into every facet of that experience and every online interaction for the entire time – first of all, who has time for that? This course also risks heavy resentment and embarrassment
Am I missing another option? As far as we know, the parents took the middle path by vetting the game and thought they were being reasonable about exposure, but the kids were still harmed.
My son doesn’t play roblox, isn’t allowed to play roblox, and doesn’t want to play roblox. I got weird vibes from it when he was small and I looked into, and just didn’t let him. He played Mario and stuff like that, usually as a family.
A decade later, My son has friends. He has at 12, no resentment for not playing roblox, bro dog doesn’t even want a phone that badly yet. Its, cool and I’m probably lucky.
Why do kids have to play roblox to socialize? Why will there be resentment? He resented the neighborhood boy the day he asked him to come over and play outside with him, and the boy said he’d rather play on his computer. My son was upset with the friend, not me. He always preferrs real life play to games online. He wasn’t mad at me for it, he was sad his friend would rather sit alone in his house (parents weren’t home) than come play in our yard.
I didn’t mean to imply that this kind of conflict between tech, parents and peer pressure would come up for every kid. It sounds like you’ve cultivated a healthy distance from tech for yours, and that this is something you hopefully shouldn’t even have to worry about.
I was into gaming with my friend group, but back then it was split-screen and LAN parties. I still got plenty of outside time and physical activity. Our games didn’t focus solely on dark patterns and addictive elements - much less the possibility of encountering random adult weirdos. The fact that the environment has worsened doesn’t mean gaming is going away or that kids will lose interest.
There is a subset of kids whose parents do have to navigate this minefield, and Roblox is just one example. That’s not to let the parents off the hook entirely, but it’s entirely plausible to me that the corporations behind their kids’ favorite games may have been misleading about safety and even complicit in enabling this kind of abuse.
I think this sums it up. Regardless of your opinion as a parent you have to trust and respect your children. This is multipled by how many “other kids” get to do a thing.
You can’t lock them away. Unfortunately this has become the current generations social platform and entertainment. If you don’t have it, you’re a weird kid.
There is this razor edge of control and freedom you have to dance as a parent all the time, not just with Roblox.
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My kids can play roblox, but they can’t use chat. They’re also very limited in their social media priviliges. It’s all cancerous and predatory. It’s a shame society has decided that this is the new standard of communication, so I can’t ban it completely.
I can’t ban it completely.
You can, you just don’t want to.
when i was a kid, it was normal for parents to say “get out of my sight” and we would just go outside and meet up with our friends. we knew it was time to go home when the street lights turned on. but then there were the kids whose parents wouldn’t let them go out to play with their friends. so they had no friends.
yea, you can force your kids into a bubble where they can’t even talk to their peers, sure. that’s a great way to have kids who never call you when they grow up
They can, they just remember what they did when their parents banned something when they were a kid.
Not cross the street alone? Not taking with strangers? Not play with fire?
Which is?
Resist and find other ways to do the thing… which is literally what kids do.
Do you want your kids to be on Roblox with your knowledge and occasional oversight, or without your knowledge at all, without any parental control?
I crafted wifi and tv antennae out of scraps of metal when my parents confiscated mine, but I don’t think that applies here. (And yes, this was a brief golden era when terrestrial analog tv signals and wifi coexisted)
Modern day parenting for you. Why parent your own kids when you can get the government to ban things for everyone because you don’t want to upset your own children.
Modern problems require modern solutions, and children are experts at getting around parental blocks.
Roblox isn’t just knowingly letting child predators use a platform for children, they’re banning people who are reporting child predators.
It’s like saying that parents shouldn’t call the cops if the management of Chuck-e-chrese lets pedophiles just hang out there.
You can block websites through your wireless router and the device itself it’s really not that difficult. Kids won’t find out your network admin password if you make it complicated and don’t give it to them. Parents have the tools but won’t put in the effort to use them.
How about don’t take your kids to chuck e cheese if you know pedos hang out there it’s really that simple.
They can use chat, trust me. Found my kid was talking to someone in one game because the characters walk around with signs in their hands that they update what they say. Concerning to say the least. My wife is blind to it, says there’s little harm in playing with other kids and claims to supervise and she doesn’t see any predators. “I’m paranoid” and a "conspiracy theorist ". I said for the conspiracy, it’s not a theory when there’s proof… If it were up to me, I’d fully block YT and RB across the full network.
