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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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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.

Discord, Roblox, and Telegram are currently the big 3 IMO when it comes to enabling Child Porn and Child Predators. Other big sites have much better policing, particularly of the images, and the more "specialized" sites usually are more for just the Child Porn, which is of course bad, but there wasn't many child users of Kik, for example, despite of, or perhaps because it was, a hive of scum and villainy.

Discord

Every time I'm foolish enough to venture into a Discord for a game or youtuber I'm interested in, it's full of trans poly individuals proselytizing their lifestyle to children. It's like all those people ever talk about, despite the server ostensibly being about anything else. And of course all the discords have rules against "hate" which means you can't ask them not to.