The video discusses alarming issues surrounding the online gaming platform Roblox, where predators exploit the platform to groom and exploit children. The platform, initially designed for children's creativity and coding, has seen an influx of predatory behavior that leaves children vulnerable to abuse both online and offline. The video touches on several incidents, including a case involving a developer who groomed children and the challenges in moderating content on the platform.

Roblox, despite its popularity and branding as a children's platform, has been unable to fully protect its young users from predators who exploit its chat and currency systems. With around 77 million daily users, a significant portion being under 13, the risk is amplified, leading to real-world dangers. The video highlights that the moderation system is insufficient compared to other social media platforms, raising concerns about safety measures and accountability.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. abducted [æbˈdʌktɪd] - (verb) - Taken away illegally, typically by force or deception. - Synonyms: (kidnapped, seized, carried off)

What's different about this story and this reporting is that we're seeing examples of these cases shifting from the online world into the offline world, where kids are being physically kidnapped, abducted...

2. predators [ˈprɛdəˌtɔrz] - (noun) - Individuals who exploit others, often in harmful or illicit ways. - Synonyms: (abusers, exploiters, hunters)

...and sexually assaulted by predators who have connected with them on Roblox.

3. procure [prəˈkjʊr] - (verb) - To obtain something, especially with effort or difficulty. - Synonyms: (acquire, secure, get)

Anytime you have an audience where it's mostly kids, predators are going to be in there looking for victims to procure.

4. ulterior motives [ʌlˈtɪriər ˈmoʊtɪvz] - (noun) - Hidden reasons for doing something. - Synonyms: (hidden agendas, secret intentions, covert aims)

More and more like he had ulterior motives, sort of. Sort of deal, you know?

5. eclipse [ɪˈklɪps] - (noun) - A loss of significance or power in relation to another person or thing. - Synonyms: (overshadowing, decline, overshadow)

This was a online predator who was a very popular developer of a sonic eclipse game that he created on Roblox.

6. vigilantes [ˌvɪdʒɪˈlæntiːz] - (noun) - Individuals who take the law into their own hands without legal authority. - Synonyms: (self-appointed enforcers, do-it-yourself lawmen, informal justice seekers)

So, because these gamers stopped believing in Roblox's ability to police its platform and keep children safe, teen vigilantes started policing the platform themselves.

7. advocacy [ˈædvəkəsi] - (noun) - The act of supporting a cause or proposal. - Synonyms: (support, promotion, backing)

I created a safety advocacy group called Moderation for Dummies.

8. vigilance [ˈvɪdʒələns] - (noun) - The action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties. - Synonyms: (alertness, watchfulness, caution)

Awareness and vigilance by parents and caregivers are crucial to mitigate risks on such platforms.

9. impressionable [ɪmˈprɛʃənəbl] - (adjective) - Easily influenced because of a lack of critical ability. - Synonyms: (susceptible, suggestible, influenceable)

Most social media platforms don't allow kids under the age of 13. Roblox welcomes them, creating a pool of impressionable users.

10. exploitation [ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃən] - (noun) - The action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work. - Synonyms: (misuse, manipulation, abuse)

The platform, initially designed for children's creativity and coding, has seen an influx of predatory behavior that leaves children vulnerable to exploitation.

Roblox Has a Predator Problem

Social media platforms, gaming platforms, all Internet companies have struggled with x-rated content and trying to protect kids or prevent them from being accessed to it. What's different about this story and this reporting is that we're seeing examples of these cases shifting from the online world into the offline world, where kids are being physically kidnapped, abducted, and sexually assaulted by predators who have connected with them on Roblox.

I've seen so many horrible things happen on Roblox. I've seen games that fully simulate sex with penetration, with fluids. There's been predators who have traveled to meet kids in real life. There's been predators who have transported children hundreds of miles away to their homes. Roblox has around 77 million daily users, and more than 40% of them are under the age of 13. Anytime you have an audience where it's mostly kids, predators are going to be in there looking for victims to procure. Who's ever seen a room full of people laying around in their underpants like their avatars? Some really full-on things are happening to kids, and it's subtle the way it starts.

What do you remember him saying to you that was bad? I remember he would make jokes like, you know, the younger they are, the tighter the hole. There's predators that will pay children with Robux to do sex acts on camera. And all of this is happening while at the same time, Roblox is branding their platform as safe for children. We've got to start thinking about how we do Roblox differently. It's like going to a place rather than playing a game. So this girl just asked if I wanted to be twins, but now she's shooting me with a gun. This gentleman over here ran up to me crying. And then there's also a tiny baby behind him who's also crying.

Roblox is about two decades old, and it launched initially as a platform for kids to learn how to code and create their own video games that anybody could play online with other strangers. Roblox is based in San Mateo, California. It's a publicly traded company that was founded by Dave Bozzouki and Eric Castle in 2004. It launched in 2006, and Bozouki is still the company's CEO. Today, anyone can design their own games to put into the Roblox mall, and users come and they visit all of those games.

Over the pandemic, when kids were stuck at home, Roblox exploded. It attracted 33 million players every single day. And that year by year, it grew dramatically. Based on this momentum, Roblox went public over the pandemic. Today, it attracts 77 million people every single day. Roblox is one of the most popular platforms used by children today. Millions of kids are playing inside these games right now. Send this to your parents. Hello, parents. Your child really wants Robux.

Roblox is powered by a virtual currency called Robux. Players are able to buy things inside the game with Robux, and these minute transactions add up to billions of dollars in revenue for Roblox. Every year, it says you need an additional 75 Robux. Roblox takes about a 70% cut of the sale, and the developer of this flower would take about a 30% cut of the sale. Kids beg for Robux from their parents, but that's also created an opening for predators to transfer Robux to kids in exchange for being their friend or even coercing them to create child sex abuse material.

We identified criminal cases linked to Roblox where predators had met and groomed children through the platform. These cases range from registered sex offenders who gained access to Roblox and found victims through the games on its platform, to examples where predators would actually use Roblox's virtual in-game currency to coerce kids into sending them child porn. In some of these cases, these predators traveled across the country to abuse kids in real life.

One of the most interesting cases I discovered is that of Arnold Castillo. This was an online predator who was a very popular developer of a sonic eclipse game that he created on Roblox. Castillo made tens of thousands of dollars because this game was so popular and children loved it so much. In the fall of 2020, Castillo's game just exploded. And it was towards the end of that year when some sinister messages he'd been sending to a twelve-year-old girl were leaked online.

There was a conversation between you and Arnold Castillo that was leaked online, and at the time, you were twelve years old. So can you bring us back to that moment for you? What was it like for you, as a twelve-year-old girl, to be speaking to who you thought was an adult man in this way? Um, at the time, I excused and justified the behavior because he kept making a huge, like, a point. They're just jokes. This is ironic. We're just joking around. My sense of humor has always been very harsh, dark humor, if you will.

And while it doesn't excuse my behavior, it does reveal that I had no intention on moving on any of the things I said. And how did your relationship with Arnold Castillo change over time? It started becoming pretty inappropriate, like, very early on. But over the years, it got more and more like. More and more like he had ulterior motives, sort of. Sort of deal, you know? Can you explain what you mean by ulterior motives? Certain things like corrupting me beyond, you know, and wanting to kidnap me, keep me in his house, keep me in his basement, you know, take me away from my parents, that sort of stuff.

When these messages leaked, a number of Roblox users filed complaints to the company. Four days after those reports came in, Roblox did take action. They disabled Arnold Castillo's account, but he was always one step ahead. He quickly created a new account and transferred the game over to a friend, who kept it running. It wasn't until the end of 2021 that these teen gamers took the fight beyond Roblox straight to Sega in Japan. One of them wrote a letter to the Sega corporation saying its Sonic the Hedgehog mascot was being appropriated by a pedophile on the gaming platform Roblox.

Sega actually filed a copyright infringement notice against Roblox, which eventually shut the game down. He was still accessing Roblox up until his arrest by the FBI in May of 2022, Arnold Castillo was arrested for kidnapping a 15-year-old girl. For you, I mean, some of the messages that he sent you years earlier were about kidnapping you, bringing you to his home, you know, having sexual relationship with you. So reading about what had happened to this girl who was abducted and taken across state lines to his home, how did it feel?

I was. I was sad. I felt terrible. I was just, like, somehow this slipped under everybody's noses, and somebody else ended up becoming a victim. And I was starting to speak up about this in the first place, specifically so people got the full story so we could avoid more victims. And that. That broke my spirit, man. That. That just. Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, it wasn't Roblox that shut down his sonic eclipse game. It was Sega. It was the intellectual property rights of a corporation that resulted in that game being shut down. Not all the complaints that these users had made to Roblox about child safety.

So, because these gamers stopped believing in Roblox's ability to police its platform and keep children safe, teen vigilantes started policing the platform themselves. One of these cyber vigilantes is a famous YouTuber known as Rubensim. I think I picked the name Reuben Sim because it sounds like Roblox. Ben Simon. I think most of my viewers would describe me as an antihero. I'm very abrasive when it comes to this type of stuff. I'm not very nice about it.

Ben Simon is a controversial figure. He's mocked Roblox employees for their physical appearance, their sexual preferences. There are also allegations that he's made homophobic slurs inside games. He was first banned by Roblox when he was just 17. Inappropriate content on Roblox is really unavoidable. Back in 2016, I was approached by a viewer who wanted to tell me about an experience that their friend had with a predator from Roblox. The things that I saw were just so terrible. I felt like I had to say something. And so I made a YouTube video about this predator and all the things that he had done.

And from that point onwards, I started getting bombarded with messages from other kids and other Roblox users to share their own experiences with predators. There is a community of people who make groups that are disguised as virtual clothing stores, and they choose this disguise because they are trying to attract the highest concentration of little girls as possible. Possible. Really making a YouTube video isn't going to do a lot to stop a predator. And so the first thing I usually ask is, like, have you told your parents? Have you talked to your local police? A lot of these kids are very embarrassed about situations like these.

They're worried that if they tell their parents, they won't let them use Roblox anymore or they'll take away Internet access. And I feel like if I were to just ignore all of the stuff that's coming in, a lot of crimes would go unanswered. For first things first, can you say, good morning, Kira? Good morning. The big, big, big thing that I wanted to talk about today is online gaming, because I know you all love it, don't you? Yeah. We're going to start off talking about Roblox. Who in here has been playing Roblox? When someone's asked you to be their boyfriend or girlfriend, who's had that happen? Put your hand up for me. You're not in trouble. Just put your hand up. Okay.

Safe on social is a leading provider of education and consulting around all aspects of cyber safety. Safety for children online has changed dramatically over the last five years because it's getting younger. Who's been offered free Robux to do something that was inappropriate in the game? Or someone has said, I'll give you some free Robux if you come and follow me on Snapchat or TikTok or something like that? Who's had that happen? Okay, loads of you. Roblox is a metaverse game. I liken it when I'm talking to students as going to a shopping centre. If their parents drop them off out in front of a great big, huge shopping mall and let them go in and do whatever they wanted for an hour.

Running around in all of those little shops, getting dressed up, figuring out who they are and their identity and all of that sort of stuff can be a whole lot of fun. But at the same time, there's a whole lot of risk there might be someone that asks them to move to another platform, which is exactly the same as being asked to go and get in a car with someone. So we need to think about that as the difference here. Most social media platforms don't allow kids under the age of 13. Roblox welcomes them. Games that are designed for children, like Disney's club Penguin or Nintendo's Splatoon two, often just offer canned dialogue options for people who are trying to communicate with strangers.

Hello, how are you? Do you want to play this game together? Good job. Roblox is different. Roblox lets anybody say anything that they want in an open chat. Roblox might censor some things. However, a lot of predators have found ways to circumvent Roblox's moderation systems. Because it's made for children, the platform does not collect any personal information about its users. That means that all of these avatars that are playing inside this metaverse are anonymous. I have no idea who I'm talking to. That's not abnormal. In a lot of video games, you're just sort of talking to strangers and making friends and enjoying the gameplay together.

It's a little bit different in Roblox, though, because kids generally assume that they're talking to other kids when they could be talking to anybody. And now please put your hands together for the founder and CEO of Roblox, David Bozzuki. I just want to highlight what Dan said about civility on our platform. It really is the foundation of everything we do. We have a really amazing vision for this, whether it's safety and civility around private one-on-one conversations, whether it's safety and civility about big outdoor spaces. What you're going to see from us is a very flexible, adaptable safety and civility structure that handles all of this.

Roblox's moderation is quite a controversial topic. It's come under fire in recent years for being too lax when you compare Roblox to other social media platforms, like, for example, TikTok, which employ a workforce of 40,000 content moderators who are policing the platform. Roblox, however, has about 3000 content moderators. The company argues that they don't need as many content moderators to police the platform. On the surface, Roblox likes to present itself as a very well-moderated, well-kept platform. But it's all. Can I swear? Yeah, but it's all bull.

Roblox has a really spotty history moderating its platform. There are a variety of ways in which kids are able to engage in the social scenarios that are not accessible to them in real life and can really bring out some of their worst impulses. There are sex role play games. There are role play games where people are police officers who are killing citizens. And it's a little bit tough for Roblox to moderate, not just chat, not just items that get uploaded into the game, but the way that people behave toward each other in 2021.

The day before Thanksgiving, I woke up to my fans messaging me news articles that the Roblox corporation was suing me for $1.6 million. It really ruined my thanksgiving. It was all I could think about at Thanksgiving dinner. My first reaction was disbelief. I was like, there's no way that this is real. The first sentence of the legal complaint describes me as the leader of a cyber mob. They had accused me of things like malice and fraud and oppression, and even like, making terroristic threats to them. Roblox and I reached the settlement.

I created a safety advocacy group called Moderation for Dummies. I made an entire discord server with a ticket system where people could report stuff, and a huge team of volunteers would comb through it, send the important stuff to me, which I would then post on the Twitter account, and Roblox would take it down. There have been several lawsuits alleging that Roblox doesn't do as much as it could to protect kids on the platform. And so investors might be concerned that Roblox will suffer reputational damages that inspire parents to pull their kids off the platform and thereby decrease its user base.

I think when trying to figure out what the solutions are to this problem, when you talk to child safety advocates, they may be calling for legislation to hold these companies accountable for these kind of harms. When you talk to people who work inside the company, they're interested in ensuring that the safety tools and features they design are rolled out today. Children on default. Another obvious solution would be raising awareness. This call is from a federal prison. To accept this call, press five to block this call. In all future calls, you may begin speaking now.

Good afternoon. Hi, Arnold. Why do you think Roblox is so popular with children today? Because it's appealing visually. It's really easy to get in and play any game the platform is so easily accessible for people of any age, whether young or old. And why do you think this platform is drawing in predators? Because the platform is just as easily accessible to them as it would be to anybody else. I remember people reported him several times to Roblox, like people besides my mom, and they would always say, if it didn't happen on our platform, there's nothing we can do, and they're not taking responsibility.

Technology, Safety, Children, Education, Gaming, Predators, Bloomberg Originals