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So Roblox is getting a lot of press lately, and it's been very negative. They're ostensibly a place for kids, but it's been known for years that pedophiles and child predators are on their platform, they keep grooming and raping minors, and barely anything is done about them if ever. Lately they banned Chris Hansen 'To Catch A Predator' style stings, banned and sent a C&D to someone who has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested using those stings, and defended their ban by *checks notes* saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators. As a result, they're being sued by the Louisiana attorney general, and even Chris Hansen is getting involved (by making a documentary).
It's too early to tell what the outcome of all this will be, but some people are concerned about potential government overreach, especially with recent pushes for mandatory online ID verification (and we all know people doxing themselves like that never goes wrong) and other laws passed in the name of children's online safety (like the UK's Online Safety Act, which proved to be too burdensome for a hamster forum to continue operating). Especially because Roblox isn't the only platform with a predator problem that isn't getting better.
I think that ID verification is bad, but pedophiles are also bad. My take (if slightly conspiratorial) is that people in positions of power are deliberately letting the pedophile problem grow out of control so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures. The public sees this false dichotomy between letting pedophiles run rampant and ID verification, and chooses ID verification as the lesser of two evils, when that's far from the case. Roblox (and Discord) had people working for free to rid their platforms of predators, and all they had to do was let them be. Yet they deliberately went out of their way to ban anybody who got pedophiles arrested, meanwhile doing little to the pedophiles themselves. It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.
Why? This behavior chain is quite comprehensible once you're willing to put the associated emotions aside.
Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can, but if you do that the ability for users to interact with each other more generally is severely curtailed. Once that happens, and they jump to other less-secure platforms like IRC[1], now all bets are off- and if you consider "it started here and then it moved to [X] platform" to still carry a risk of reputational damage (and we'll note the article validates this perspective) you're likely going to decide to thread the needle by attempting to keep your chat platform just functional enough that your users stick to yours, where you at least have control of content filtering (and again, you can't turn it up to max because if you do your users are more likely to take the cues and leave or find parallel methods of communication, so you're not going to put many resources into this and are going to focus on keeping a low profile).
Well, they kind of are- they foul up any actual investigation, intentionally antagonize existing users, and they actively encourage the bad behavior. "Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes" is not a meme I [as a platform] would want to encourage, because there are obviously plenty of kids willing to make that trade if prompted![2]
(The same argument can be made for not glamorizing mass killers/shooters- it puts the meme in public consciousness, much like "hey kid, want a ride in my van/some candy/to help me find my dog?" is, which is why even though kids are heavily inoculated against it those lines still get used by predators today.)
So then, in an environment of such inoculation, what could they possibly be doing? Well, about that...
It appears to me that there are a couple of pathways this stuff typically follows. Most of this is obfuscated for reasons- some honest, some not, but examining the nature of what happens is important if you actually want to reduce incidences of the actual problem.
The first one is the OnlyFans model, which works on anyone literate enough to read a DM. This can take a few forms- the "send me nudes and I'll send you Vbucks" one perhaps the most common, but can extend into non-monetary goods like gaining access to more exclusive social groups as well. This is a standard commercial transaction, and any kid who's ever run a lemonade stand understands how that works.
Now, how does that go wrong? Well, either the goods aren't ever delivered (and I'm more concerned about the contract violation than I am about what's being transacted), or the 'price' of entry to that club is raised (either 'send more nudes to continue' or 'because I know who you are, I'll tell everyone you know about this business') and the calculus now being made is 'send the nudes or lose all my friends'. The problems with that should be obvious- everyone hates getting ripped off that way.
Obviously the way to avoid that is simply by teaching kids to practice safe SECS with the end goal of making sure that, should they engage in this business, they retain the ability to disengage without further cost. You'll recognize that as the conceit of the "meh, sex isn't a big deal" point of view, and that's not an accident. The other way to do it is simply ensure your child artificially puts a price on their nudes that's so high there's no risk of them selling it, but this abstinence-only method tends to disappoint parents with its effectiveness. (Which, naturally, is why it's only these people that ever go pedo-hunting.)
The second one is the "secret romance"/"special friend" model, which only seems to work on young adults (13-16) and not actual children (<12), probably because their biology isn't demanding that from them yet. It's naturally more prevalent here than it is anywhere else because this is basically the only place left that age group can interact with older people with some low-barrier common cause and with relative safety to disengage.
Hardening your targets against that is... more complicated.
[1] Discord is literally just IRC, so the same complaints we had back in the 90s remain true today. The same mitigations do too- "don't use your real name or give out your address because if you do, your ability to control the engagement goes out the window"- but whoring for favors (and just... general stupidity) is pretty clearly perennial.
[2] One man's victim blaming is another man's disregard of obvious agency, and online is, perhaps paradoxically, obviously the most difficult place to try and rape someone specifically because your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met) in a way that really doesn't exist when they're right in front of you. This interaction takes two in a way most other environments do not, and ignoring that truth is not doing one's analysis any favors.
In a fight against "preventing pedophilia at all costs" and "making sure de facto freedoms for the under-18 set are not sacrificed on the pyre of protecting the stupid from themselves", I'm picking the latter. Bearing witness to the horrors that have been unleashed upon (and by) my generation that destroyed everything except for the Internet as that frontier has hardened my heart against those that would destroy that too.
They were going to do this anyway.
It's never about reducing kid-fucking, literally nobody cares about that, it's all about paying your supporters with the right to fuck kids (the "drain the swamp" people are directionally correct here). Quite literally, when we're talking about the UK.
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
This doesn't make sense to say when Schlep (the banned "vigilante") has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested in real life.
I'm not aware of any instances of this happening.
To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency. I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example but then you spend a lot of words elaborating on exchanging nudes for Vbucks. In any case, it is extremely oversimplified to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so.
That "unless other conditions are met" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. In most cases it's not as simple as blocking the predator precisely because of conditions like: the fact that minors are easily impressionable and manipulated into doing what predators want them to, the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want. The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.
This is the bit that baffles me. I remember the whole Ashton Challenor situation on Reddit and how much pressure it took for Reddit to crack. AIUI, the people doing this on Roblox aren't even employees or mods or anything.
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For obvious reasons, I should hope.
It's in the article.
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it? (Have you ever seen a child before, much less interacted with one?) Most people only grant access to their nudity behind a paywall because it is actively unpleasant to show it off [much like how most people won't labor unless they're getting something out of it]. Unless they're nudists, I guess, in which case it's questionable if they're being hurt at all (but that's an entirely different conversation).
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly? "Fuck me or I'll kill everyone you know" or "fuck me or I'll get you in trouble" has been part of the bog-standard predator playbook for ever; in my time as much as it is in theirs. The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
For a playerbase in the tens of millions I don't think this constitutes "frequent". While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem (like the bomber, the predator will always get through), and the optimal rate of FAFO per year remains nonzero.
Yes? They're desperate for adult approval.
But as far as these kids know, the person asking them to send nudes is roughly their age. They don’t know they’re talking to a 40-year-old. Plus, I would say that, in general, kids are desperate for the approval of the adults who are already in their lives, not of random adults whom they’ve never met.
I preface this by saying that I'm happier not being on discord or knowing very much about it.
But isn't the whole thing driven by adults entering a child's life with ill intentions? Like isn't that the definition of grooming? I'd suspect that the request for nudes comes when the relationship is already underway.
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