This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This and the lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, and others are inevitable.
In the absence of essential government regulation, even in the face of significant adverse consequences for young people and their welfare, civil lawsuits will have to be enough to force these shitty companies to act appropriately.
I think there is a case to be made that platforms need to employ a certain ratio of background-checked moderators if the users are potentially vulnerable.
This is the law irl in classrooms etc. So what if your platform is “too large”, that’s your lookout. And it’s why we don’t fill stadiums full of unsupervised children.
And it’s why we don’t fill stadiums full of unsupervised children.
Bad analogy.
While I do believe Roblox has been doing a terrible job handling reports of predators on it's platform and the fact that they would rather silence reporters than dealing with the reports is completely abhorrent and inexcusable. I do believe that the responsibility isn't entirely on them.
Roblox isn't a daycare. It isn't a school. It isn't marketed to have any responsible adults online per number of players.
Honestly, what is the solution that this lawsuit aims to enforce? Paid moderators with complete criminal background checks to be responsible for 10 underage players each? Who's going to pay for this?
All that said would I allow my children to play Roblox unsupervised? No. Which is a shame as many of the available games are fantastic and my friends children really enjoy playing them. That said supervison can literally be myself glancing over every now and then to see what type of game they are playing and if they are interacting with anyone, really low tier, low effort parenting skills if you know what to look out for.
This lawsuit makes me feel extremely validated in my fight with my ex about not letting our kid play roblox unsupervised. Same with letting them use tiktok/youtube.
Since the chat update released in January, communication in Roblox is a big mess. AI wrongly detects adults as children and vice versa, the only 100% safe way is through ID. Plus, there are kids asking their parents to verify for them. A lot of players are in the wrong age group, so you don't really know how old are the people you're talking to. Ironically, all of this pushes more players to use messaging apps like Discord –where you can chat with fewer restrictions, excellent for predators– instead of the native chat. But you can still enjoy games peacefully if you never talk or prefer single player experiences.
My kids can play roblox, but they can't use chat. They're also very limited in their social media priviliges. It's all cancerous and predatory. It's a shame society has decided that this is the new standard of communication, so I can't ban it completely.
