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Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator. Not even the PCGamer article you're linking to even intimates that. It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it and anyway if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?
I'm not sure about the ID thing, the reason, I've been led to believe, why it's hard for Roblox to police who is actually underage or not is because of COPPA where they can't legally ask for more information from a user that has identified as under 13 unless they get their parents permission. Also, the online Safety Act shutting down that hamster forum was because it has additional requirements not related to age like submitting some kind of safety report on their website and making sure there was no possibly illegal content on the site or be subject to a fine and they opted to shut down rather than risk having to possibly be subject to a fine (or deal with writing a report, maybe).
Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now. You can filter content by maturity or by sensitive topics (political/culture war things), you can hide microtransactions, only allow certain players you designate to join their server and not allow them to join other servers, DMs are not possible to anyone under 13, you can limit their playtime, you can also go through and look at what your kid has been playing, who they've been playing with, their recent public and private chat history. This is just from making a Roblox account and linking it to your kids' account.
I'm not saying there's not a problem but the predators go to Roblox because it has their prey. So, naturally, it has a predator problem. But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.
The second says:
I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.
Unless it updated recently to ban "vigilantes", this is quite a novel interpretation of the terms of service.
Liability for what? The "vigilante" they banned, Schlep, didn't do anything remotely near what NBC did to Bill Conradt. Schlep was just somebody who collected evidence and reported pedophiles to law enforcement.
Arguably, Roblox has just as much liability if not more for the pedophiles they do know about but never ban. Schlep and other so-called "vigilantes" have consistently reported them to Roblox, but they refuse to act in most cases, even if the pedophile has been arrested, and only rarely actually bans them if there is a highly publicized video made about them. Remember that Louisiana's lawsuit isn't the only one Roblox is facing as a result of their refusal to ban pedophiles.
Consider the fact that there is an arbitrary limit of 100 games that parents can block for their child before they can't block any more games. This isn't sufficient to prevent their child from being exposed to sex games because there are way more than 100 sex games on the platform and Roblox seemingly does nothing to ban them.
If the platform they visit actually bans pedophiles when they are reported, there will be much less of a predator problem compared to Roblox.
There are a lot of things we let cops do which we do not let random citizens do. If you try to by drugs from a cop and get arrested, "but I was running a vigilante sting operation" is not going to fly.
From my understanding, all relevant parties on Roblox appear as minors. The actual minors appear as minors. The child buggerers pretend to be minors because that is much more likely to be successful -- a 14yo might send nudes to what they perceive as a 15yo, but not to some 30yo creepy dude. The vigilantes pretend to be kids because otherwise the predators would not be interested in them.
Crucially, none of the parties knows the identity of the other party. If two bi-curious 14yo girls trade nudes, then that could be two girls (or 15yo boys!), or any of the five other combinations.
Both the predator and the vigilante have an interest to lure their conversation party off-site and then get them to do something incriminating.
An ethical vigilante would just sit there and wait to be hit on, then play the reluctant-but-willing-to-be-persuaded minor. Even then, that would be rather icky, because there is always a chance that the person on the other end is a minor. Flirting with someone who poses as a minor and might be a minor is bad. And if they go off-platform and the first thing the suspected predator does is sending them a nude selfie which confirms he is indeed a 15yo kid, they might be on the hook for CSAM.
And simply joining with a username like fluttershy_2011 and talking about MLP all day waiting for some creep (or boy) to hit on you might not work very well for vigilantes. So they might take a more active role instead, which would be even more problematic.
So then would you agree that Roblox has said or implied "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators?
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You have to get halfway through the Discord article before you get this section:
"Yes Discord does provide parental controls that would have prevented these incidents, but we didn't use them so it's still Discord's fault!"
No, your quote says that the parents didn't know that they existed and that's why they didn't use them. And this matches my experience after reading through hundreds if not thousands of publicly available cases of minors being groomed on Discord. The majority of minors don't have parental controls enabled. I don't have any hard figures but my gut feeling is that roughly 0.01% of minors on Discord have an account that is actually under parental controls, if at all.
I think the main problem with them is that it's a completely opt-in system and the minor has to intentionally share a QR code with the parent in order to be connected. So even if we assume they voluntarily link the accounts or are forced by their parents to do it, at any time they can just create another account that is outside the purview of the parents, and they would be none the wiser.
Discord parental controls look to me to be something that Discord can point to and say "hey, we're safe for children!" rather than actually being safe for children.
Bro come on. At some point a parent has to take responsibility here. Why would anyone let their kids just hop onto these websites without doing basic due diligence or educating them on the reality of predators?
If a platform provides robust parental controls then they've done enough, full stop. The baton of responsibility is passed.
See downthread. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, it's hard to change, and anybody going against it will be seen as overly paranoid.
They should also ban pedophiles when they are reported and proactively look for them too.
I understand there's a culture of letting your kids do whatever they want. I see it every day. It doesn't make it right and more importantly doesn't transfer responsibility to someone else.
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My parents (admittedly over 60 now) can't reliably open a browser on a laptop. They certainly have no idea what a QR code is. The idea that parents will be able to find the parental controls, understand what they're doing, and set them independently is unlikely in many cases, so they have to trust their children. In ten years it may be quite different but right now I think that's still the reality and realistically Discord has to bear that in mind.
I don't find this convincing at all. The parents failing here are elder millennials with a smattering of young gen Xers: digital natives. They're being lazy and stupid, and they should know better after being on the Internet at similar ages as their kids.
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If your parents are over 60, they are presumably no longer expected to be taking a hand in managing your online activities? (if not, better not tell them about The Motte!)
I'd think that this level of technical incompetence would be a pretty big outlier for anyone much younger than that (ie. current parents of young children) -- anyone I know born after 1970ish can certainly find and navigate parental controls if they have to.
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What is the alternative to an opt in system? In this specific case we're taking about the ability to add friends. Is no one allowed to add friends on discord until they prove they are a legal adult? Is that accomplished by setting a drop down box in their profile or must they upload a government issued ID?
How about parents take responsibility for their kids instead of imposing restrictions on all the rest of us because of their laziness.
Banning pedophiles from the platform as soon as they are reported, and proactively looking for them too.
Easier said than done. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, and I have a feeling that any parent who goes against this norm and, for example, stringently monitors their access or even prohibits them from using the Internet entirely (because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all) is going to get looks from other people, or at least their kid will say "Billy gets to use the Internet, why can't I?" Unless everybody in a community agrees that the Internet is too dangerous for kids to be used unsupervised, reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."
You misunderstand: that norm is enforced merely by intentionally refusing to prioritize your version of safety.
Yes, which is why they're both treated as absurd by psychologically-healthy individuals. Interestingly, the latter is espoused by more parents than it would naturally be since the stranger is far more likely to be the State, which is far more dangerous.
It is interesting to see the parallels between how the paranoid in our culture seeks to treat children and how fundamentalist Islamic cultures seeks to treat women. I'm not convinced it's good for their personal development, but personal development is not a terminal value in these cultures (Islam worships Allah, westerners worship Safety) and "but muh risk of predation" is merely a fig leaf over that.
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