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Roblox failing to deal with its "pedophile problem" [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2024-07-23

Bloomberg News reports that Roblox, the social media game platform marketed heavily at the children who use it, is infested with pedophiles and that the company is "not always winning" its "battle" against them.

Doc's dark, edgy humor only made him more compelling to many kids. When he posted a joke about rape, one fan replied, "10/10." When he called young girls who helped him develop Sonic Eclipse "sex slaves," it became a running gag. He quipped about being "the old man with kids in his basement." Fans sparred with one another to get on his good side—and on his payroll. … Since 2018, police in the US have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they'd met or groomed using Roblox, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Businessweek. Some were already on sex offender registries or had been accused of abusing minors; there were also a sheriff's deputy, a third-grade teacher and a nurse. In just the past 13 months there have been seven arrests, including those of a man in Florida accused of trying to kidnap a teen he played with on Roblox; a man charged with abducting an 11-year-old New Jersey girl he met on the platform; and a California man who allegedly abused a kid he, too, had met on Roblox. These predators weren't just lurking outside the world's biggest virtual playground. They were hanging from the jungle gym, using Robux to lure kids into sending photographs or developing relationships with them that moved to other online platforms and, eventually, offline.

From Bloomberg's lengthy and well-reported article, one gets the impression that Roblox "battles" these predators the way online retailers "battle" counterfeits and fake reviews. It'll do a certain amount of work to contain it, but those efforts are really about limiting liability and bad press. As was always the case with growth-obsessed internet startups, anti-abuse measures can't be permitted to interfere with the numbers or with the stories they can tell about those numbers. Children anxiously treading water in a sea of adults' money is the whole business of Roblox.

Good luck with those dating app plans.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/23/roblox-failing-to-deal-with-its-pedophile-problem.html

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