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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.
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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