ROBLOX is one of the most popular games in the world, and it has built its popularity via the children who play it.
The majority of Roblox’s players are children, with 56% being under 13 years old, and 67% of users under 16.
In 2023, Arnold Castillo was charged with Transportation of a Minor with the Intent to Engage in Criminal Sexual Activity after meeting a child on Roblox.
Castillo claims to have paid an Uber driver $1k to bring the child across state lines to his house.
He developed one of Roblox’s most popular games, Sonic Eclipse, and was reported for sexually explicit messages with minors as far back as 2020.
While this account was banned, he created new accounts on Roblox, and maintained notoriety as the company didn’t remove the game from the platform until 2021, when Sega filed for copyright infringement.
Castillo is far from the only case of predatory behaviour on the platform, and according to a report by Bloomberg, since 2018, police have arrested at least 24 people accused of abusing and abducting children they met or groomed on Roblox.
Following Castillo’s arrest, Roblox has tightened security measures, and reports of child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from the company have skyrocketed.
Roblox reported 13,316 instances of child exploitation in 2023, compared to 2,973 the year before.
Parents have criticised the platform for its child safety measures in the past.
Roblox uses AI to censor certain words from in-game chat but predators have used different words or emojis to get around these censors.
Castillo said: “It’s very easy to make an account. It’s very easy to play a game.
“[It’s] very easy for an adult to talk to a young person.”
He also described how it was easy for him to meet kids on the platform and shift them to less moderated spaces by using ‘cord’ instead of Discord.
Speaking to Bloomberg, an anonymous source claiming to be a Roblox moderator said that her team receives hundreds of escalated reports involving child safety every day.
Roblox employs just 3k human moderators but claims that the size of its moderation team isn’t an indicator of quality.
We reached out to Roblox for comments on the report and a spokesperson said: “A recent article contained glaring mischaracterisations about how we protect users of all ages on the platform and failed to reflect both the complexities of online child safety and the realities of the overwhelmingly positive experiences that tens of millions of people of all ages have on Roblox every single day.
“We wanted to take this opportunity to set the record straight and reaffirm our ironclad commitment to keeping Roblox safe.
“Bloomberg fails to provide context on the scale of these reported incidents vis-a-vis the amount of content on the platform and growing user base of 77 million daily active users.
“In a single quarter, Roblox users generated and uploaded approximately 205 billion total pieces of content.
“The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) CyberTipline in 2023 received more than 36.2 million reports, with the vast majority referring to incidents of suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
“Roblox contributed less than .04 percent of that report total.”
If you want to read more about Roblox, check out parents concerned with Roblox’s intention to include 17+ content.
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