By Gavin Boyle
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a subpoena demanding information from Roblox about its child safety policies to determine if the company is doing enough to protect its young users.
“Platforms like Roblox have become breeding ground for predators to gain access to our kids,” Uthmeier said. “We will stop at nothing in the fight to protect Florida’s children, and companies that expose them to harm will be held accountable.”
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Related: Roblox Makes Shocking Claims About Recent Child Safety Concerns
The Attorney General’s release went on to explain how Roblox has been used by thousands of sexual predators to groom their victims and continue to abuse them time after time. Roblox has been accused in the past of enabling these actions to occur, rather than suitably changing their child safety protocols to protect young users.
This year, Roblox overhauled its child safety settings to protect its young users better.
“Safety has always been foundational to everything we do at Roblox,” Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman said in a July blog post. “Our goal is to lead the world in safety and civility for online gaming. We’ve spent nearly two decades building sophisticated safety systems, which supports our mission of connecting a billion people every day with optimism and civility.”
In the months since, however, multiple incidents have made it clear that the new safety settings have changed little. In August, for example, a ten-year-old girl was abducted from her home by a man she met on Roblox who was posing as one of her peers. Nonetheless, Roblox continues to claim it is already a safe platform that is only getting safer.
“The reason why we’re here, it’s so important for us to really land the message of how much we prioritize safety,” Roblox vice president of civility and partnerships Tami Bhaumik said at the end of September. “I’m gonna call out the elephant in the room: many of you may have seen negative press about Roblox in the last month or so.”
“And it’s very important — because we’re meeting now with safety organizations, researchers, academics, we’re meeting with governments — to really, really make it very clear what a safety framework is and how much we prioritize it,” Bhaumik continued. “We’ve launched over 100 new safety features over the course of the last year. A lot of the negative press has come from things that have happened five years ago.”
Uthmeier is now doing the work to determine how safe the platform really is. Through the subpoena, he will be able to determine how much Roblox knows about the predators on its site and whether it is genuinely working to thwart their efforts or enabling their evil deeds for profit. Time will tell how this investigation ends and whether Roblox is truly a safe platform or a known haven for bad actors.
Read Next: Roblox Enabled Young Girl’s Abduction. Now Her Parents Are Suing.
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