Florida Attorney General Uthmeier sues Roblox, claiming “serious failures” to protect children from sexual predators
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that his office is suing the gaming site Roblox for misrepresenting the platform’s safety measures to protect children from sexual predators.
In a video shared on social media Thursday, Uthmeier said that his office has taken several steps to investigate the online platform, including launching a criminal investigation back in October.
In the post’s caption, the Florida attorney general claimed that Roblox is “hiding behind press releases and superficial safety measures while predators are openly grooming and targeting children on its platform.”
While the investigation continues, he said his office is using “all tools in the toolbox to hold this dangerous platform accountable.”
“That’s why today I’m announcing that my office is filing a lawsuit against Roblox for what we believe are serious failures to protect our kids,” Uthmeier said. “We reviewed the information demanded in our subpoenas and what we found is unacceptable.”
According to Uthmeier, Roblox “aggressively markets to young children but fails to protect them from sexual predators.” He continued, saying as a father of three young kids and as Florida’s top cop, his top priority is simple: “To protect our kids.”
“Roblox broke the trust of parents and my office will make sure they answer for it,” he said. Uthmeier’s subpoenas investigated whether Roblox’s actions aid child predators in gaining easy access to children who use the gaming site.
According to his office, multiple investigations into Roblox revealed that sexual predators are using it to communicate with and groom minors. Additionally, Uthmeier’s office said predators have been using “Robux,” the in-game currency, to bribe minors to send explicit content, including images of themselves.
“This lawsuit fundamentally misrepresents how Roblox works,” Roblox’s cheif safety officer Matt Kaufman said in a statement.
“We have advanced safeguards that monitor our platform for harmful content and communications,” he continued. “Users cannot send or receive images via chat, eliminating one of the most prevalent opportunities for misuse seen elsewhere online. We are also rolling out additional measures to further limit who users can chat with, going beyond what is required by law and what other platforms do.”
The company also said, “We take swift action against anyone found to violate our safety rules and work closely with law enforcement to support investigations and hold bad actors accountable.”
CBS News reported last month that Roblox said it will soon require players to use AI-powered facial age-estimation technology to help verify their age. The system, combined with ID-based age verification and confirmed parental consent, is intended to “provide a more accurate measure of a user’s age than simply relying on what someone types in when they create an account,” the company said in a statement.
In an interview, Roblox CEO David Baszucki described the guardrails as “what we believe will become the gold standard for safety and civility on the internet.”
A gaming platform surrounded by controversy
Recently, dozens of families and state attorneys across the country have filed lawsuits claiming that Roblox is harboring child predators because of a lack of safety measures.
Aside from accusations of exposing children to sexual predators on the platform, a recent CBS News investigation found that there have been at least a dozen instances of hate speech targeting minority groups across Roblox servers that have been bypassing the platform’s moderators.
