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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26733 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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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.

The second says:

Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).

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.

It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it

Unless it updated recently to ban "vigilantes", this is quite a novel interpretation of the terms of service.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

If the platform they visit actually bans pedophiles when they are reported, there will be much less of a predator problem compared to Roblox.

Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).

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.

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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