Nebraska sues Roblox over child safety failures

Roblox is facing a major lawsuit in Nebraska, accused of failing to protect children from predators and unsafe content on its platform.

Attorney General Mike Hilgers, filing the case in Adams District Court, alleges that the gaming service allows minors to interact with adults and encounter sexually explicit, violent, and age-inappropriate material despite the company’s safety measures.

Roblox faces multi-state legal pressure

The Nebraska lawsuit argues that sexual predators have repeatedly used Roblox to groom and abduct and sexually assault children.” “For years, Roblox has known that it has a paedophile problem,” according to the complaint.

According to the complaint, Roblox has targeted pre-teens with its marketing efforts and has represented itself to be the ‘#1 gaming site for kids and teens’ but has provided its vast library of user-generated games and features like real-time messaging to facilitate child predators.

However, Roblox Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman has defended company by stating that “it is built with safety at its core, and such features are enhanced every day.”

The safety features provided by Roblox include age-based chat filters, image and video sharing restrictions, parental controls, and third-party age verification through Persona. 

In addition to that, it has been noted that Roblox blocks direct messaging to children under 13 years old and blocks in-game chat for children under 9 years old unless parental approval has been enabled.

Notably, over 130 lawsuits have been consolidated into multidistrict litigation in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Some of the cases reported involved children being led to other platforms such as the “Discord platform", where the predator could communicate freely with the child, leading to severe physical harm to the child.