Leaked Documents Reveal How Roblox Handles Grooming and Mass Shooting Simulators

Roblox is among the world's largest games and is sometimes described as a kind of primitive metaverse; it is one of the world's most popular children's games.

The exact figures are a bit blurred, but in 2020 Roblox told Bloomberg that "two-thirds of all US children between the ages of 9 and 12 use the game."

However, leaked documents have recently revealed how the free online game played by this number of children under 16 "is tackling grooming, automatic image scanning, and more with a team of thousands of people," the American Vice reported.

Roblox appeared to encourage children freely talk about sex, and their created avatars can have virtual sex and "enjoy" virtual sex parties.

 

Grooming and Sexual Abuse

Newly leaked documents showed an unprecedented look into the murky world of Roblox and how one of the most famous gaming platforms in the world moderates content, from how executives at the company moderate mass shooting simulators to how big of a "bulge" in player-designed clothes.

The documents also rang the alarm bells about the targeting of children by predators, grooming, and sexual abuse.

One of the documents included this weird suggestion directed to children that reads: "Roblox is a new Society. What kind of Society do we want to be?" and the question itself was murky.

There were also internal discussions about how to react to some of the content moderation of the highest-profile challenges the platform has faced, like when "to remove user-made games that simulate mass shootings and how to respond to media inquiries about strip clubs in the game," according to Vice.

The documents, stolen and published online by a hacker, also include a database with a system to register banned terms that can be used in the game discussions.

This system is allegedly intended to define the severity of a particular phrase and is classified into categories like "bullying," "sexting," "underage," "racist," "grooming," "subversive," "self_harm," "religion," and more.

In one of the documents, new categories were introduced for the Safety Group as "grooming."

Another lists some of the vocabulary related to "grooming" and appears to assign them a score. "Wish you were younger" is scored as a 3. "Can I get a {{media}} of you" is a 5. "Don't tell your {{family_member}}" is also a 5. There are also scores of 6 for "hump kids," "{{child}} slave," "{{child}} predator," and other horrifying terms that clearly relate to child sexual abuse, the American magazine said.

 

Virtual Sex Parties

The principle of Roblox is allowing users, and most of them are children under 13, to create and play games together and mostly to connect, in a digital world, with other people.

Through the developer tools which the platform provides, young gamers can create games.

The content in the platform is led by its users, unlike the traditional games, but this wildly successful business model comes with problems.

The sex games of Roblox are commonly referred to on the platform as "condos," where the users can talk about sex, and their avatars can have virtual sex; when playing these games, Roblox talks no more about rules.

In an interview with the BBC in February this year, a spokesperson, admitting Roblox's problems, said: "We know there is an extremely small subset of users who deliberately try to break the rules."

Whether through manual or automated systems, Roblox says it is always trying to take these games offline, stressing: "We conduct a safety review of every single image, video, and audio file uploaded to Roblox, using a combination of human and machine detection."

Larry Magid, president of ConnectSafely, a non-profit organization that raises awareness about child safety online, said that it's a "cat and mouse issue," as some content always finds a way to slip through the net.

 

Extremist Content

In a report published on August 18, 2021, the New York Post said Roblox is not doing enough to stop the players who keep recreating mass shootings inside the popular video game.

According to the Anti-Defamation League researcher Daniel Kelley, the game users have repeatedly recreated the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, where a white supremacist gunman killed 51 innocent people at two mosques.

Kelley posted screenshots showing a recreation of the mosque where the massacre occurred on his Twitter.

"I swear to God, I would like one time to search for 'Christchurch' on Roblox and not find a new recreation of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting on a game platform aimed at very young children," Kelley wrote.

According to him, there were recreations of the Christchurch massacre in Roblox in January 2020 and in May.

This was not the first time. The game has also been criticized for hosting recreations of "Nazi armies and Roman slave camps," according to a Wired report from June.

Roblox went public in early 2021 with a market value of $36 billion, saying, "The success of our business model is contingent upon our ability to provide a safe online environment for children to experience."

"If we are not able to continue to provide a safe environment, our business will suffer dramatically."