This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Would be pretty silly if roblox lost a lawsuit for letting someone else exploit children through their platform.
Just to clarify:. I am not saying that it would be silly if roblox lost this particular lawsuit but rather the possibility that the law holds negligence to be somehow worse than the direct exploitation of children that Roblox openly participates in through their less-than savory user-created content store
They're well known for doing fuckall about it and banning anyone who attempts to report such activities to police, the CEO's deffo gotta be put on some kinda list man, some weirdass bookey guy. He tried making a 17+ dating app integrated with roblox, yk a kid's game played by mostly 7 y/o's.
The details of the case are a bit more complicated, but essentially the TL;DR is that the kid was autistic and the parents were under the impression (based on Roblox's advertising) that his account was locked down to only be able to talk to kids his own age. The adult perpetrator was pretending to be another boy the victim's age. The part which seems kind of weird legally is that the actual abuse occurred on Discord, after they moved to that platform from Roblox.
Personally IDK how much responsibility we should say Roblox has. I think our culture has a major problem with no longer fearing the Internet. When I was a kid it was taken for granted that if you let your kid use the Internet unsupervised there were pedophiles waiting around every corner. That hasn't changed, but both parents and companies have seemingly just forgotten about it. I think it's kind of insane that Roblox is allowed to act like they can prevent your kids from talking to adults when that is obviously false. I also think it's kind of insane to believe them.
The situation is tragic. I read a longer article about it and just felt bad for the parents and the victim. They really were trying to do the right thing, and they tried to cut their kid off from online games when they found out about all this but again he was autistic and it was one of the only things that could calm him down. It has got to be tough being a parent these days.
I'm not saying that I think roblox should be protected from a lawsuit, I made a bad joke about how roblox exploited child labor with their outrageous percentages on their store (I have no idea if that still happens because I'm perpetually ~10 years behind everything in pop culture)
Roblox fights parents trying to prevent abuse. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/roblox-defends-banning-vigilante-users-as-criticism-over-child-safety-grows/ar-AA1Kxxzn
I mean they practically encourage it
I think I worded that poorly; Roblox is infamous for exploiting the labor of children, in the form of user-created content, to generate a shitton of money on their store by taking a (rather large) percentage of the sales.
Somehow we had second life before Roblox and as bad as some places there got it still was never as awful as Roblox.
I imagine it's because Second Life was never popular with children.
As bad as mostly-adult spaces can be, the worst kinds of humans seem to skitter around children's spaces.
SL was too complicated when I was a kid. Might be different now, but a lot of us went onto IMVU instead. It originally had no separation for over and under 18 accounts, but even after they added it you had both kids and adults blatantly intermingling anyways. You couldn't search up over 18 rooms as under 18 or search under 18 rooms as over 18, but people could still invite and chat.
Nothing quite like being 15 and hanging out with your friends until one of them invites their mid-twenties boyfriend to the chat.
Something about the density of innocent and helpless prey really appeals to people who like to prey on the helpless and innocent.
Its kinda sad, a child has just died, and some big corpo is right now would be thinking how they can use this as a way to extract more data out of everyone in order to make profits.
us stopping won't bring the dead child back and if we stopped now their death would be meaningless. we will actively support the deaths and suicides of numerous children for as long as it brings value to the shareholders we are beholden to.
Roblox does not seem to care what they do as long as it makes money. This seems like a huge problem.
Discord on the other hand... I honestly don't care if they go out of business, I really don't like that platform. But how did they have any responsibility in this matter?
The actual abuse occurred on Discord after the child was groomed on Roblox.
Yeah, my point is that it is just a communication tool. I wouldn't expect them, or want them, to monitor that. If they had been phone calls would they be going after the phone company? If it had been letters would they go after the postal service?
I can't see blaming them. Whereas I can see how you can blame roblocks as it is marketed to children with the pretense that there are safeguards.
It argues that if Roblox and Discord had taken steps to screen users before allowing them on apps, or implemented age and identity verification and other safety measures, “Ethan would have never interacted with this predator, never suffered the harm that he did, and never died by suicide.”
They want these sites to screen every users ID on sign up. I’m sure the courts will love another, “for the children” security bill.
Discord has been taking down free bot systems that people have created to cross check user history and keep them away from minors by banning them from all servers that subscribe to the service. It was entirely opt in and discord obviously doesn't care that people are groomed they are in fact facilitating in and blocking any organized efforts to stop predators.
As they should, honestly. While those bots can be used to track down and identify predators, they have also been used for harassing and doxxing innocent users. There's little to no security oversight with those bots.
So is discord providing a better alternative to monitor ban the creepy predators then, even if these bots are flawed are they not providing necessary security
They're completely opt-in for server admins and use publicly available information to ban users seen logged into "condos" which are sexually explicit and used to groom children. It's a system called Ro-Cleaner (among others) that allow moderators to blanket ban these people.
The fact is that Discord and Roblox aren't doing anything to prevent this activity despite being responsible for facilitating it (condos are published on private Discord servers). When people report these servers or the condos they refuse to do anything meaningful.
I haven't actually seen any evidence of doxxing/harassment. The system does not collect information other than usernames and the activities of those users in Roblox, both of which are publicly available. I would be interested in hearing whatever information you may have on this.
Roblox said it is designed with “rigorous built in safety features” and is “continually innovating new safety features — over 100 this year alone — that protect our users and empower parents and caregivers with greater control and visibility.”
The fact that they are framing it in this manner "100 features in this year alone" (what does this even mean?) suggests that they don't care.
If you could pump out 100 features in 1 year, how little were they doing before??
The parental options don't do a fucking thing. The game's predatory by design (in every meaning of the word)..
I couldn't even name a hundred safety features. Ten would be enough. Age gate, parental controls, moderators, a report function... What more does it need?
"No one in the history of games has cared this much!"
But now they know blatant bullshit lies generally work pretty well on our population so expect more of this crap.
Roblox should be sued for alot of things, this is one of them.
Why? It's idiotic to force age verification and an ID to play games on the internet, and I'm assuming the kid didn't just click a button to turn off parental controls. He probably got his parents to do it. Liability shouldn't be pushed off to others every time something bad happens. This is the groomers fault. Not a game company or an internet provider or anyone else. Hell; why not sue Intel for making a processor that allowed the game to be played and discord to be used? Do you also expect every startup game company and Indy dev to have millions of dollars worth of chat security and oversight? Shit like this is nothing but a money grab.
why not sue Intel for making a processor that allowed the game to be played and discord to be used?
actually, lots of people are taking this approach
actually, restricting what operating system you can run on your smartphone is exactly that. you can only run stock android/iOS (if you don't want a whole lot of other stresses) and those in turn restrict what apps you can run on them ...
it's not a good way, let me tell you, i just wrote an article about why this is so bad yesterday (it's not finished yet or i'd post it here)
to sum it up: we need generic computing devices ("general purpose computing device") that you can run any software on. (this includes installing any operating system you want trouble-free). there's philosophical background to that idea, including "the software must act in the interest of the user, and since the hardware can't know the user's interest, it must be open to any software".
right now, android/apple phones are not that. they're targeted at one specific operating system. we need a label "general purpose computing device" that is applied as an attestation of good quality to phones that can run any operating system (trouble-free). this especially includes unlocking and re-locking the bootloader.
possibly this isn't for everyone, but it should at least be a possibility. :D
This isn't an age verification problem, its a moderation problem. A massive one. There's hundreds of games that exist almost entirely for the purpose of grooming ppl (a common one is so called "bathroom simulators" iirc) and roblox frequently doesnt do anything about them until there's public outcry about ine particular game, no matter how many reports come in or how obvious it is.
Game companies shouldn't have to monitor and supervise children. Each kid already has adults legally responsible for them. It isn't a g companies job to do someone else's job for them, nor be financially responsible for criminals or parenting.
A game made for kids should not allow sexually explicit material on their platform. And, in fact, they don't, this kind of content is very clearly and explicitly against roblox's content policy but they fail to enforce it.
Grooming allegations notwithstanding, Roblox itself reminds me of those generic games you'd see a character playing in some TV show.
I think the same about the story of seasons games.
Sadly, the first thing the defending lawyers will point out is where were the parents in all this? Why was he able to turn off the parental controls, and why didn't the parents notice?
"Roblox allowed Ethan to turn off the parental controls "
If true, this is very damning for Roblox.
Parents can't be everywhere all the time checking what they already set up, that's unrealistic.
Maybe the first thing is that it's just the predators fault and anything beyond that is bullshit. Gonna sue the company that made the PC too? Maybe the electric company for providing the electricity to it?
while i understand your approach, your ideas might not be enforceable.
what if the offender is located in some other country where there are no sexual offense laws? i'm not so sure on the details but such a location certainly exists. then you can't really get them out of the way. but on the other hand, the internet has no real borders so they can still connect to the rest of the world.
essentially, some kind of content-warning system needs to be established for certain platforms that are not guaranteed clean. this might affect gaming platforms, such as roblox. either they implement better quality controls or they don't get a "clean"-label.
parents can then set a checkbox that allows their children's computer to only show "clean" content.
I don't think screening is the answer, but with Roblox and Discord, the follow-up on reports of predators is lacking and should be punished severely by the courts. I don't care if your profits go down a percentage point or two, you need to improve your product.
Will be settled out of court.
