Don’t trust Roblox to protect kids — our lawsuit exposes its risks

If you have kids, one of the most dangerous objects in your home is the screen you may be using to read this column.

We can lock our doors and set the alarm system, but digital dangers are relentlessly coming after our families — and our children most of all.

Hardly a week passes without news of another online predator — like the Queens man arraigned Tuesday, with four others, for targeting kids as young as 11 on Roblox and other online platforms to create horrific exploitation material. 

To counter such headlines, last month the kids’ gaming platform Roblox, with more than 380 million monthly users, announced new safety measures.

The company’s splashy public-relations rollout — which came several weeks before the platform will actually go live in the United States — made much of features like “facial age checks” meant to limit communication between adult users and kids.

But they’ll do nothing to eliminate the problem at the core of the Roblox business model: allowing children as young as 5 to create accounts and chat with people they don’t know, without any parental consent.

All of us share a goal of creating safe environments for our kids to learn, grow and explore on the internet.

Roblox, though, has a history of implementing safety tweaks that sound good in a press release but fall short in practice.

Many parents think of Roblox as “the safe one.”

It’s marketed as the platform where our children can play and interact with other young people in a fun environment without fear of inappropriate adult contact.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

That’s why our team in the Kentucky attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit against Roblox in October over its devastating failure to protect children on its platform.

The harm is twofold.

First, Roblox did not create the safeguards necessary to keep predators from pretending to be children within the platform’s games and animations, known as “experiences.”

In effect, the platform became a facilitator for groomers to target and exploit young victims online.

Tragically, grooming that starts online has all too often escalated to real-world sexual violence, abductions and sextortion of young children who simply do not understand the dangers — with this week’s federal case one of many examples.

Second, Roblox allowed a horrific ecosystem to fester on its platform through user-generated content, failing to design and implement age-appropriate guardrails to protect young users.

For example, our complaint details so-called “assassination simulators” that popped up on Roblox shortly after the murder of Charlie Kirk, which displayed graphic depictions of his shooting.

It cites pages and pages of reporting on online sex rooms and marketplaces for the trading of child sexual abuse material.

Nearly two-thirds of all US kids between ages of 9 and 12 play games on Roblox.

My own son — who was 10 at the time — outsmarted the platform’s lax age-verification process to create an account without my knowledge, permission or input.

It’s too easy for kids to log on to Roblox without their parents’ consent. And once they’re on, the entire dangerous digital world is flashing before our kids’ eyes.

Roblox’s November press release isn’t the first time the company has rolled out new features that claim to protect children.

But its so-called child-safety policies have consistently failed to actually keep children safe — and even former Roblox developers say they wouldn’t allow their children on the platform because of its dangers.

My message to parents: Get your kids off Roblox. Do it today. 

Roblox gained positive media attention for last month’s safety push, but the company has only done so in the face of lawsuits like ours.

That is not the sign of a good corporate actor. It’s the sign of a company that’s finally facing consequences for its past unlawful activity.

We can hope this change is a step in the right direction that truly mitigates this platform’s harmful nature.

But Roblox hasn’t earned parents’ trust, and we shouldn’t take executives’ word that they’ve seen the light.

That’s why we will continue vigorously pursuing our litigation to protect Kentucky kids — and children across America.

We won’t stop holding this company’s feet to the fire until I can look Kentucky parents in the eye and tell them we’ve held Roblox accountable for the harm it’s caused our kids.

Russell Coleman is Kentucky’s attorney general.