Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The attorneys at Anapol Weiss have filed four lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children from various parts of the U.S. (Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas) who were sexually exploited on the Roblox platform. Anapol Weiss is investigating hundreds of similar cases and will be filing many more lawsuits in the upcoming months.
Shareholder Alexandra Walsh and nationally renowned abuse attorney Kristen Gibbons Feden are spearheading our efforts to hold Roblox and related companies accountable, bringing extensive experience to this high-stakes litigation. We are demanding justice for our clients and seeking to hold Roblox and other companies accountable.
This is the type of experience that is advertised for children but has the same lootbox system thats predatory and paylocks most of the games. Every shitty mobile game practice is worshipped by every “dev” in Roblox to make a quick buck of children wanting to have fun. Its basically a child exploitation market.
“Allowed” implies they knew about it, and let it happen anyway. Is that actually provable? They knew about these specific cases and knowingly let them continue happening? Some may say its just semantics, but semantics is literally the only thing lawyers and judges care about.
Like, if someone buys a car and then drives into a crowd of people killing multiple and injuring many more, you wouldn’t say that the car manufacturer “allowed” a mass murder to happen. I wonder how the lawyers will talk about this case.
Yeah you can.
If the inappropriate content was reported as such and they took no action then that means they allowed it. They knew about it, due to the reports, and did nothing.
Perhaps, but simply reporting content does not prove that they are aware of it. Their report system could be automated, and it might not flag those specific reports for human review, or it could have been lost or dropped. I don’t know, I am just particularly curious as to how lawyers will be able to prove beyond any doubt that whoever at Roblox actually knew about the problem and willingly let it happen. I don’t doubt that Roblox was certainly negligent, but I wouldn’t know for certainty that they could be labelled as “allowing” as opposed to “neglecting to take action.”
Also, under US law, ignorance is not a defense in both civil and criminal court. It does not matter if you did not know it was illegal, it does not matter if you did not know it was happening, if you provide an avenue and forum for illegal activity you are culpable at minimum. The corporate shield will prevent any criminal charges against individuals, unfortunately, but the civil liability is pretty evident. It occurred on their platform which means that they did not take sufficient steps to prevent or discourage the practice in the first place. It should not have been a thing that was present to report or react to in the first place. It falls into the same vein as doing background checks and personality evaluations on prospective teachers and daycare workers. Doing 0 checks to validate that these people are not a danger and then claiming ignorance when they touch children in the broom closet is a nonstarter too.
prove beyond any doubt
This is a civil case, not criminal. It isn’t a matter of “did they do this”. It’s a matter of “how much are they responsible for this”.
Well documented on youtube for years. Roblox condo is essentially a disaster because when one of those games go down, another one takes its place. There’s so many of discord servers dedicated to condos, all of which are essentially places that manipulate and groom underage people.
Its always against tos, but like always, they choose what to moderate, and clearly they don’t give a fuck about these enough
What are condos? Is that short for something?
The terms in Roblox are weird. I recently learned what “obby” is. (Obstacle course)
This vid is just one of many documenting this
Think of it as roleplay games but a lot worse
I get reminded of this quote from their studio exec:
“You can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labor,’ right? Or you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income,” Corazza said. “So I can be like, 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now with just a laptop, I can create something, make money, and then sustain my life.”
When I read that quote a few weeks ago, I thought about how that’s the kind of argument people who travel abroad to rape kids use to justify themselves.
It feels related to this, somehow. Maybe something about how children are treated like a disposable resource or an object to be used unless the person who owns them (parents?) are powerful, well to do, white, etc, etc. And that’s because their owner is those things, so they’re valuable property. I’m not sure if I’m articulating myself well. Too much sun.
There was a quote in the last season of Mythic Quest that was functionally verbatim to that quote. I can’t believe it’s actually a real quote.
It’s a valid argument, but it’s not supported by their actions, which are demonstrably exploitative.
And not really comparable to rape, especially child rape, due to consent obviously; there is no non-exploitative form of that. Sex work is work, but children can never give informed consent, and even adult sex tourism is almost always exploitative.
The article brings up good criticisms, like all the minors getting molested due to the platform being negligent, and manipulative in game spending options. Paying for online content creation work doesn’t seem as bad as that to me though.
I never played Roblox and tend to be fairly out of the loop, and even I have heard about Roblox in connection with child exploitation. Hope those kids eventually get justice and their predators prevented from harming them.
