Grooming allegations notwithstanding, Roblox itself reminds me of those generic games you’d see a character playing in some TV show.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)…
“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.
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?
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?
"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.
Will be settled out of court.
I doubt it’ll go anywhere, and I’m not sure it should.
Do we want tougher moderation on social media? Does social media need to be policed?
Most social networks have report tools. They also have blocks.
If someone is rude to you online — honestly, happens all the time. People have a bad day or whatever. I’ve said something, not even meaning to, that set someone off and they’ve stalked me across communities. Even in the last few weeks I’ve been on Lemmy. But, if someone is consistently negative toward you, you can block them. You can also ignore them. You could even call them out on their bullshit and then ignore them, and that’s what I did. Maybe it wasn’t the best course of action, this guy’s probably got a girlfriend or maybe a kid he’s beating up when he doesn’t get his way with people online. But I have no control over that. What I do have control over is how I feel when people talk to me any kind of way. The way they act could be because of any number of things. The way they were raised, the way they’ve been treated, maybe they burned their hand cooking and they’re just mad at the world right this second and they say something rude. I got no control over any of that whatsoever. What I do have control over is how their words make me feel and how I react.
Maybe that’s something kids can’t just pick up, but maybe it’s something they should learn. Bullies aren’t going to go away. People aren’t going to stop having bad days. But if they’re taking it out on people through social media, they aren’t a physical threat to you — they can be safely ignored.
Adding a bunch of extra moderators and safety features and all that won’t change things. It won’t make people behave better. We can’t make them do that. We can try. Maybe AI can be used to detect hostile posts and tell people they can’t use the network for an hour, tell them to go touch grass or something… but they’ll just hop on over to another network and do the same shit there. And there will be so many false positives. So I think we should just ignore hostility. On something like this, you can downvote it. If it’s the same person, the network may even show you that you’ve downvoted this person multiple times, and you can then decide to block them. But maybe they’re helping someone in another community. Block them and move on. It’s faster and it works better.
If you’re advertising your platform as kid-friendly; you need to ensure proper steps are done to protect them. Roblox, a billion dollar game platform has failed on this. Let’s say you’re a responsible parent. Your kid asks you GTA 5, you check its age rating and say no.
Your kid asks to play Roblox. You look up, see the game advertises itself as safe for children and find about parental controls for concerned parents, create your son an account using it, setting proper age restrictions. Later on, you find out your kid got groomed by someone he met on Roblox, even though you set proper precautions. Is it your fault for not helicopter parenting your son that he got such a traumatic experience, has Roblox done nothing wrong here? I don’t think so.
Yeah, I think there’s more that platforms can do to help but I don’t think age verification or reading messages is it either.
What really annoys me is how people will go… Parents should parent… But then nobody is helping them figure out the best way to parent a child on apps. How are they supposed to know what to do? They’re probably not on Roblox themselves, don’t know anyone who is, don’t understand it, don’t know how best to talk about it with their kid, etc. Parental controls are great but not enough, parents need help to do the best thing. They aren’t all knowing and this shit is changing all the time.
I think it’s the responsibility of parents to parent but it’s also the duty of the company to help them understand their product and how best to help their kid and it’s the duty of us all to look out for the most vulnerable in society.
