Warning: The following contains descriptions of child abuse. Please guard your hearts and read with caution.
Louisiana is suing the children’s gaming platform Roblox for ““knowingly and/or recklessly” failing to protect children from online predators.
“Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue and profits over child safety,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill wrote in a press release.
“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.”
Roblox hosts hundreds of online games on one interactive website. With a couple of clicks, users can create their own avatar, explore hundreds of games, or “experiences,” and chat with other users.
More than 80 million users visit Roblox every day. An estimated 40% are under 13 years old.
Louisiana’s lawsuit accuses Roblox of breaking state laws protecting consumers from unfair and deceptive business practices. The case rests on four key assertions.
- Roblox’s platform is rife with child predators.
- Roblox refuses to adopt meaningful safeguards to oust child predators.
- Roblox deceptively markets its product to children and families.
- Roblox has financial incentive to sacrifice child safety on its platform.
Let’s break it down.
‘X-Rated Pedophile Hellscape’
Louisiana sued Roblox one month after police executed a search warrant against a local man suspected of possessing child sexual abuse material. Officers reportedly found the suspect playing Roblox with a voice-altering microphone making him sound like a little girl.
Louisiana’s lawsuit connects this disturbing incident to “systematic patterns of exploitation and abuse” on Roblox in which predators pretend to be children and befriend real kids using the platform’s chat features.
Roblox claims abuse primarily occurs when predators lure kids off Roblox and onto other platforms. But Louisiana’s complaint cites several examples of grievous exploitation occurring on Roblox itself.
In 2024, for instance, investigators at Hindenburg Research, a well-respected forensic financial research firm, “easily found” 38 Roblox groups with hundreds of thousands of members “openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors.”
The exhaustive report concluded:
Our in-game research into [Roblox] revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.
Since 2017, there have been at least ten documented cases of children between eight- and 14 years old being kidnapped or otherwise physically harmed by adults they met on Roblox.
In April, a ten-year-old from California was kidnapped by a man she met on the platform. Last month, a Florida mom sued Roblox for facilitating the exploitation and eventual rape of her 11-year-old daughter.
Shallow Safety Features
Roblox introduced a suite of new child safety features in November 2024 mounting criticism about the platform’s safety. The roll-out changed the default settings on accounts for children under 13 to automatically:
- Filter out age-inappropriate games.
- Prevent adults from chatting with or friending kids.
But Louisiana’s lawsuit calls these updates “window dressing — too little, too late and woefully inadequate.”
The new default settings might prevent adults from messaging children outside of games, for instance, but adults can still message, friend and even voice-chat kids inside games.
Roblox’s so-called safety upgrades also assume:
- Games are rated accurately.
- Players honestly report their ages.
But the platform doesn’t enforce either of these pre-requisites.
But Roblox doesn’t enforce either of these prerequisites. It does not verify the ages of players; children can easily bypass more stringent default account settings by signing up with a fake birthday.
Roblox also allows game developers to rate their own games. That’s why Louisiana notes the “vast majority” of “experiences” are rated “suitable for everyone,” including:
- “Condo games”: “Predatory digital environments, including [digital] houses, where users can remove their avatars’ virtual clothing … and engage in disturbing simulated sexual activities with other Roblox users.”
- Simulated strip clubs.
- Hundreds of games like “Escape to Epstein Island,” which references the infamous Caribbean Island indicted child predator Jeffery Epstein allegedly abused children on.
Poor Policing
Louisiana’s complaint also cites evidence suggesting Roblox isn’t interested in policing its website.
Though Roblox professes to monitor explicit or threatening speech, its chat filters are easily fooled by basic ploys like replacing the letter “e” with the number “3.”
Roblox also allows users to adopt transparently pedophilic usernames, like @Igruum_minors and @RavpeTinyK1dsJE. The platform reportedly allowed Hindenburg investigators to sign up under the username @EarlBrianBradley — a reference to one of the most prolific pedophiles of all time.
Deceptive Marketing
Roblox’s claims about its “stringent safety systems and policies” don’t reflect reality, Louisiana argues.
The state’s case notes the following inflated claims from Roblox’s website:
- Roblox “won’t allow language that is used to harass, discriminate, incite violence, threaten others, or used in a sexual context.”
- Roblox employes an “expertly trained team with thousands of members dedicated to protecting our users and monitoring for inappropriate content.”
- Roblox conducts a “safety review of every uploaded image, audio and video file, using a combination of review by a large team of human moderators and machine detection before they become available on the platform.”
- Chat filters for inappropriate content are “even stricter” for children under 13 and screen for any “potentially identifiable personal information, slang, etc.”
Louisiana is not the only state to question the veracity of Roblox’s marketing. In April, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier subpoenaed documents from Roblox regarding its marketing and safety practices.
“There are concerning reports that this gaming platform, which is popular among children, is exposing them to harmful content and bad actors,” Uthmeier wrote in a statement.
“We are issuing a subpoena to Roblox to uncover how this platform is marketing to children and see what policies they are implementing — if any — to avoid interactions with predators.”
Profit Motive
Louisiana’s case endeavors to prove Roblox intentionally jettisons child safeguards to increase its profits.
The suit cites Hindenburg’s interview with a former Roblox senior product designer.
“You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe, but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics,” the former employee told investigators.
“It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, leadership doesn’t want that.”
The same source claimed employees had proposed verifying users’ ages. Roblox leadership allegedly killed the initiative before it left the “experiment” phase.
Louisiana also highlights the predatory exchange of Roblox’s digital currency, Robux.
Players purchase Robux with real money and use it to buy items and extras in Roblox’s digital world. The more users join Roblox, the more Robux are exchanged.
The states’ filing argues Roblox directly benefits from the improper use of Robux to coerce children:
[Roblox] knowingly and/or recklessly permits predators to offer children Robux, often in exchange for explicit photos, or demand Robux to avoid releasing previously provided photos, directly tying [the company’s] profits to the sexual exploitation of children and child abuse material.
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Shortly before Louisiana filed suit, Roblox banned predator hunter Michael Schelp from the platform.
Schelp grew a sizeable YouTube following by posting videos of himself ferreting out predators on Roblox. He, himself, was groomed and abused by a predator on Roblox between the ages of 12 and 15 — a years-long abusive relationship which eventually drove him to attempt suicide.
Now, he works to protect kids from the same fate. According to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, his work has led to the arrest of six offenders — all of whom physically met up with Schelp after meeting his character on Roblox.
Apparently, Roblox isn’t interested in Schelp’s services. The company didn’t just ban him — it updated its Terms of Service to remove all “vigilantes” from the platform and threatened the YouTuber with legal action under the Computer Fraud Act, ostensibly for pretending to be a child while engaging with predators.
The move has generated mainstream media coverage and social media outrage.
The question on everyone’s mind: If Roblox really wanted to rid its platform of predators, why would it go after a person famous for catching them?
Why It Matters
The Daily Citizen applauds Louisiana for holding online corporations like Roblox to the same consumer protection standards as every other business.
Legal accountability is a critical part of enabling parents to keep their kids safe online and ensuring corporations don’t profit off pedophilia.
Additional Articles and Resources:
Teen Boys Fall Prey to Financial Sextortion — Here’s What Parents Can Do
Proposed SCREEN Act Could Protect Kids from Porn
‘The Tech Exit’ Helps Families Ditch Addictive Tech — For Good
Supreme Court Upholds Age-Verification Law
‘The Dirty Dozen List’ — Corporations Enable and Profit from Sexual Exploitation
