Roblox Security Attempts
The popular game for all ages, Roblox, is being accused of not doing enough to protect the kids on the site due to the amount of inappropriate contact made through the game. The Roblox company is attempting to make security changes to fix this.
Roblox has always been known as a game built on connection and variety because its players make their own games to interact with other players, although these connections are still clouded by anonymity within the space.
“You have the anonymity, and you have the disinhibition effect,” digital psychologist Dr Liraz Margalit said. “This platform provides you with the playground to do anything you want.”
The site gives direct access for strangers to communicate, and in turn puts more children in danger. Louisiana general attorney, Liz Murril, is suing Roblox for their perceived lack of safety guidelines.
“Due to Roblox’s lack of safety protocols, it endangers the safety of the children of Louisiana,” Murrill told AP News. “Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety.”
A popular Roblox content creator known as Schlep had similar concerns and decided to take these matters into his own hands. He partnered with known predator catcher Chris Hansen and attempted to bait and catch predators who used Roblox for inappropriate relations. Schlep has since been controversially banned from Roblox for doing this.
“We record the chat logs on mobile and scroll through them for the cops, and we give that to Roblox, too,” Schlep said. “It’s enough for the cops where they’re willing to charge and prosecute these people, but it’s not enough for Roblox to take action on their platform.”
Roblox continues to say that they are taking actions to make Roblox safe for its younger users. They say that their priority at the company is their audience, and they will continue to protect them.
"Safety on Roblox is at the core of everything we do,” Roblox spokesperson James Ka said in the article, ‘Young girl returned after kidnapping by man she met on Roblox’. “We have stringent safety systems and a team of thousands of moderators who enforce a strict set of community standards on Roblox, including zero tolerance for sexual content of any kind.”
The article detailed a kidnapping and sexual assault that happened in 2022 of a 13-year-old girl by a 33-year-old man who she met through Roblox. The company’s team has been updating its policies and safety measures to attempt to make the app a safer place, so horrible events like this do not happen again.
”We looked at what they were saying, we looked at what they were reporting and all of that went into our moderation system so that we could go and identify bad actors on the platform and bad content on the platform,” a member of the safety and civility team at Roblox, Max Kaufman said, in episode 28 of Roblox’s official YouTube channel series, tech talks.
The Company CEO, David Baszucki, has claimed to have made several changes to Roblox’s safety features recently.
“We plan to expand our age estimation systems to include everyone using communication features by the end of this year. We expect that our approach to communication safety will become best practice for other online platforms,” Baszucki wrote in an X post.
Baszucki has made many changes to Roblox to help its users, but is there really any boundary a predator would not find a way over to attempt to access its next victim? Parents are concerned for their children, and so are the police, who have to keep seeing reports about these situations.