- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
Roblox is possibly the most popular gaming platform on the planet—far more popular than you might think. Grow a Garden, a game built within the app, recently had 21.9 million concurrent players, dwarfing the likes of Fortnite and Counter-Strike 2 by multiple times. And that’s despite being an application recently described as “a pedophile hellscape for kids.” Well, it can now add another similar accolade to its collection, as the entire state of Louisiana has announced it’s suing Roblox, calling it “a breeding ground for sex predators.”
Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill announced the action via X, explaining that she’s coming after the gaming platform due to its “lack of safety protocols,” and the claim that this results in danger for children. Which, in most circumstances, might come across as all-too-familiar hyperbole from a member of government looking for a moral panic to latch onto. It’s just, in the case of Roblox, it’s something that’s been demonstrated to be true over and over again. But no matter the accuracy, the question remains: What is the actual, practical purpose of this suit?
“Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators,” says Murrill, “because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety. Every parent should be aware of the clear and present danger poised to their children by Roblox so they can prevent the unthinkable from ever happening in their own home.”
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I feel bad for kids online today. When I was a tween and we got internet I used to bug adults to hang out with them in chat rooms and they flamed my ass because I was a stupid kid and to go away. Now it seems like it’s totally different and people be out there looking for child brides.
The concern was always there with regards to child safety on the net; I remember parents in the 90’s freaking out about predators lurking in AOL chat rooms.
I think the difference these days is the scope and scale. There’s a lot of big money in Roblox, especially from people buying skins and accessories for their characters. And the predators love to use those to lure kids; “You don’t want to look like a noob, I can give you some pro skins, just chat with me for a bit on this other platform.” So there’s a direct financial incentive for Roblox to turn a blind eye to this problem because the problem makes them money.
True Anon did a recent episode about the discord nihilist shit that gets kids to do heinous shit. I feel bad for the kids.
Was it a patreon episode?
It’s episode 465: 09A — The Eastern front It’s mainly about Nazi groups but it mentions their overlap with these discord servers that egg kids on to hurt themselves/others
I would never tell people my age online not because I knew they wouldn’t take me seriously if they knew I was a teen lol. Almost a shame that voice chat has gotten more popular
Big if true
Could be the first ever documented example of a conservative attempting to protect children instead of endangering them
in most circumstances, might come across as all-too-familiar hyperbole from a member of government looking for a moral panic to latch onto. It’s just, in the case of Roblox…
Nothing good can come from Christofascist Louisana moral panic yada. Let’s see how they trojan this case into enshittifying online and offline life even more…
Ugly ass game that exploits child labor
Theres nothing really to say. She’s a piece of shit but basically everything she’s saying is true, for once.
Broken clock situation. If you use “protecting kids” as a smokescreen for censorship and other red flags of fascism, you’re bound to eventually actually catch a few predators or protect a few kids from genuine threats, usually by accident.
Accident? Roblox was basically asking for this. Broken clock doesn’t fully describe this. This is the broken grandfather clock nobody’s touched in decades being set back into place out of nowhere.
This actually seems reasonable
Ok so why are they really doing this?
It’s not because they care about sexual predators or pedophiles because they ignore the ones around themselves all the time.
So what’s the real reason someone has beef with Roblox? Are they just stirring up fear in a new generation of parents that weren’t around for previous moral panics and it happens to be the biggest target to go for?
These are scary internet pedophiles, who are inherently othered as opposed to the good ol’ boys on your local schoolboard or whatever. I don’t think the willingness to ignore heinous things when expedient socially or politically precludes being disgusted and outraged by them otherwise.
As for what comes from this, I don’t really know though. More control and surveillance of internet activities is in accordance with broader goals. I doubt that they’ll come up with anything that particularly helps with online grooming or abuse, but it will look good probably.
Roblox is the inevitable, capitalistic result of any game that targets or has a major audience of children while relying heavily on additional purchases (ro-bux or whatever in their case) to do fun things or be seen as cool, better etc.
It’s very simple. Children do not have access to money in any meaningful amount as they are children. Thus they cannot afford these things. Children also have poor decision making, poor impulse control, are naive, and so on and so forth. Their brains are not fully developed. They take excess risks without thinking of consequences. They’re impulsive.
So what are a bunch of impulsive, poor impulse control, dying to fit in, naive, poor decision making, kids who need money to do? They get it from pedophiles who flock there to exchange their adult money and use their adult mental faculties to exploit, groom, and pay kids the thing they desperately need (in-game currency) in exchange for sexual exploitation.
This will never not be a problem. There are schemes for proving one is an adult with a state ID, face scans, AI comparisons, possession of a credit card, etc. There is no similar test or reliable way to authenticate a user as a guaranteed minor so you cannot keep adults out. You can totally kill all ability for player communication but that’s not profitable (and also wouldn’t stop a proliferation of third party sites enabling such “matchings” of kids who want money for robux with pedophiles). You could remove the in-game currency but that’s not profitable. You could do your utmost to get rid of kid players and never target them in the first-place but that’s not profitable.
The only solution is banning games with this kind of economy entirely or making a rule that if they target kids as an audience or develop a meaningful audience of children they cannot provably get rid of they are subject to painful loss of money in the form of this kind of stuff being banned for them until that ceases being the case. But that’s not profitable.
So, online ID laws for porn or accessing speech platforms online = not protecting kids. Banning predatory games that target and groom minors to need real money to be cool, progress, have fun, etc = protecting kids. Only the former is actually being widely implemented across the west.
poor decision making, poor impulse control, are naive, and so on and so forth. Their brains are not fully developed. They take excess risks without thinking of consequences. They’re impulsive.
Me in 40’s feeling very seen right now.
Roblox for sure has a larger economy than Louisiana. So that is an intresting power dynamic there.
I cannot overstate how much psychic damage the internet has contributed to kids.
well, you know what… I could consider crit. support of this measure.
It’s weird to think that the computer lego game i tried for a bit back in 2007 turned into the pedophile computer harvester that hunts children that it is now.
Besides how Roblox now a den of pedophiles now, that I think is more an effect than a cause, it does strike me as a game that would have, ideally, have a high-ass age rating due to
- Being online-only, with random visitors and chatting capabilities, no anonymous presence allowed
- Having a free-form gameplay where creators can make entire games in it
- Thriving on mxts, having robux incencetives for creators
A good game for teens, from the parents’ standpoint, is where they have a predictable experience with as less addiction-inducing mechanics as possible.
GTA: SA, the controversy queen at the time, was more safe for children because even with it’s sandbox gameplay, you couldn’t encounter or do anything more than cartoonish violence or, like, boring sex minigame in Hot Coffee. Most games are like this or even more sterile, with all toys screwed down to the floor, where player can not deviate from a range of experiences baked into it. CoD, of all games, presented a space where the chat was the worst offender as it was put in stone in our massmedia, but other than that you just shoot people and watch propaganda, that’s what you can tell by it’s cover.
There we see not a built-and-released game where we can estimate anything, but a platform that hosts an uncontrollable space of minigames, a risk factor 1, where you encounter random individuals, rf2, and that encourages you to spend money, rf3.
If we are to take age ratings seriously, these three should put Roblox deep into M territory.
I remember some games started with the disclaimer ‘ESRB doesn’t rate your online communication experience’, and oh, well, it fucking should start doing that. If you don’t limit your chat capabilities to the likes of point-and-call wheel seen in Valve games, you get a more mature rating. Not to say that community-created minigames themselves could be even worse offenders, like, someone can create a challenge to draw a palestinian flag! Where’s the admin?!
And fucking mtxs, man, why the fuck we still not considering them a red flag and a reason to ban the fucking thing? Roblox, Fortnite, gachas and others got billions on that, they grew because of that, and game developers/publishers started to pursue that model because no one cared about it. All while having just a cosmetics shop should’ve led them well into adult market where all their lucrative technics couldn’t work as well as with children.
Even without all the pedos on said platform, it’s still not a game for children.
