As Roblox Attempts to Deflect Bad Press For Lax Safety, Another State Sues It For Child Endangerment
- Texas joins Kentucky and Louisiana in suing Roblox for child endangerment and misleading parents about safety.
- More states, including Florida and Oklahoma, are investigating Roblox over predator activity.
- YouTuber Schlep, who exposed predators, was banned and is now suing Roblox with major law firms.
- Roblox launched a new Partnership for Youth Online Safety and parental initiatives to improve its image.
- Critics say Roblox is avoiding accountability and trying to silence victims through private arbitration.
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Corporate Greed Beats Child Safety
Following news that Roblox’s lax child safety rules have led to multiple lawsuits from private citizens, media personalities, and entire states, the company continues to try and right the ship. It’s been busy rolling out new regulations and rules in an effort to curb reports of sexual content and other inappropriate material.
However, it still has a long way to go: Texas is the latest state to lodge a lawsuit against the gaming platform, citing Roblox’s continued refusal to follow state and federal laws, while also deceiving parents into thinking it’s safer than it is.
“We cannot allow platforms like Roblox to continue operating as digital playgrounds for predators where the well-being of our kids is sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed,” said Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton in a recent press release.
“Roblox must do more to protect kids from sick and twisted freaks hiding behind a screen. Any corporation that enables child abuse will face the full and unrelenting force of the law.”
The State of Play
Texas marks the third state to file a lawsuit against Roblox, joining efforts by Kentucky’s Attorney General Russell Coleman and Louisiana’s AG Liz Murrill to hold the gaming platform accountable for allowing predators to use it to groom children.
Meanwhile, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier recently issued criminal subpoenas to Roblox, to gather more information related to suspected predators and victims. Uthmeier joins Oklahoma’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who started legal proceedings in September against Roblox for being “overrun with harmful content and child predators.”
All of this follows actions by YouTuber Schlep, who set everything in motion in August this year when he revealed that he’d helped catch six sexual predators on Roblox. But, even though he tried to involve Roblox, the company sent him a cease-and-desist letter, then promptly banned him – not the predators. Schlep is currently working alongside Chris Hansen and major law films to take Roblox to court.
All of these have called-out Roblox, and often its CEO David Baszucki, for offering tone-deaf statements on its poor security, as well as for refusing to actively engage with those criticising the company. However, Roblox has taken steps in recent months to tackle the issues leveled at it, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down: Roblox announced, on Oct. 29, that it’s co-founded the brand new Partnership for Youth Online Safety.
We’re All in This Together
The Partnership for Youth Online Safety has been co-founded with the Center for Humane Technology, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on promoting tech that supports people’s well-being and a shared information environment. Together with Roblox, it’s involved the Attorney General Alliance, law enforcement agencies, other nonprofit organizations, and families, to create a bipartisan, multi-sector initiative dedicated to strengthening online safety for children.
“This partnership with the Attorney General Alliance is a landmark step in our ongoing commitment to online child safety,” said Baszucki. “By combining our decades of experience in online child safety with the authority of the Attorneys General, we can move quickly to co-design and deploy the next generation of protective tools and frameworks. This collaboration will help set new safety standards across the digital ecosystem used by kids and teens.”
The formation of this initiative is the latest step in Roblox’s ongoing efforts to negate the bad press that Schlep continues to highlight on social media (such as Roblox games based on dating apps), and Roblox’s own reluctance to actively engage with the likes of Chris Hansen.
Hansen posted on social media a few weeks ago that Roblox agreed to provide background info, but refused to do an on-camera interview with him. It did, however, agree to give him a pre-recorded interview based on questions Roblox itself would prepare. Hansen is continuing to try and get someone from the company to agree to a normal interview.
Schlep’s Update
Roblox has since reached out to Schlep, as the 22-year-old YouTuber revealed in a new video on his channel on Nov. 8. In an email sent by Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s Chief Security Officer, an olive branch was offered to Schlep to talk about making the platform safer, and to also reinstate Schelp’s banned accounts.
However, when Schlep acquired Stinar Gould Grieco & Hensley (SGGH) and Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman (MCBPG) as his lawyers, they made it clear to Roblox that all future contact should be done through them. Instead, Kaufman sent the email directly to Schelp, ignoring the law firms and their request for discussion in good faith.
Schlep didn’t respond, but SGGH did. The firm sent a letter to Roblox reminding the company that it, and Schelp, were still open to an honest conversation about how to work together to prevent any further predators from using the platform.
“If Roblox is sincerely interested in a constructive conversation about platform safety, we are open to engaging in such a dialogue, provided it is not conducted in a context where our client is simultaneously being threatened, publicly maligned, and privately courted without notice to his legal representatives,” SGGH said.
Roblox has not responded to this in the two months since it was sent; the letter followed Baszucki being interviewed live on CNBC during the Roblox Developer Conference in September, where he actively avoided two point-blank questions about Schlep, before pivoting to praising him.
“We’re really consistent, but I would highlight we’ve reached out to Schlep,” Baszucki said. “We’ve reached out to the General (Murrill). We love their, you know, feedback and input to how to scale our system.”
As for Schlep, he said that Roblox is mistaken if it thinks he’s more interested in getting his accounts back than the platform’s safety. “I will not trade my voice for a few Roblox accounts. At the end of the day, there’s thousands of survivors who were not listened to, who were dismissed, who were harmed on a platform that told the world it was safe.”
“After what happened to me when I was younger, I searched the world for that voice. I will not stop speaking out for the thousands of victims that this platform has created.”
The Public Face of Roblox
The last few months have seen the company roll-out safety-based update after update. The most recent “snapshot” was released on Nov. 6, and details multiple youth-based initiatives, a “Parent Council” to “advise on platform features, policies, and resources,” and how the company has open-sourced its PII detection technology; this is an AI-powered tool that monitors online conversations for users who try to circumnavigate Roblox’s policies and ask for personal information.
However, while its public-facing news posts routinely highlight the important steps it’s taking to keep users safe, and ensuring complaints and concerns are being heard, Roblox has been trying to force a California lawsuit into private arbitration, but a judge has ruled against this.
The case in question involves a young man who, from the age of 13, was found to be in talks with someone from Roblox who offered him Robux (in-game currency) for explicit images. The alleged predator also sent threatening messages to the teenager, making it clear they knew the youngster’s home address, phone number, and school.
“I’ve traditionally kept myself as a ‘helicopter parent,’ so I did all my research,” the boy’s father, who’s since moved the family elsewhere, said in an interview with ABC News. “I did my best to enable every parental control I could find, and a lot of them are pretty confusing, but I tried my best to keep him safe online and teach him as best I could, and it still happened.”
The family’s attorney, Alexandra Walsh, who also represents around a dozen other clients suing Roblox, said “(It was) a motion to silence this family, to prevent this family from presenting what happened to them to a judge and jury, and instead put it into a secret rigged system.”
“Roblox has followed suit in multiple other cases…they’ve either filed similar motions to compel arbitration, or made very clear that they intend to do so.”
For its part, Roblox countered the news with “We are deeply troubled by any allegations about harms to children online and are committed to setting the industry standard for safety.”
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