Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/23/roblox-failing-to-deal-with-its-pedophile-problem.html
…
9 Likes
Since 2018, police in the US have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox,
“What the Fk is going on with our company?” asked no one ever in their board meetings.
Disgusting.
6 Likes
Maybe Elon “Pedo Guy” Musk can fix it.
2 Likes
Sounds like they’re doing more than Instagram, for whom doing nothing would be a step up. In between being inactive in the face of predators:
Account owners who report explicit images or potential predators to Instagram are typically met with silence or indifference.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/takeaways-instagram-child-influencers.html
and actively making things worse, by constructing the algorithms such that content targets pedophiles to the point where they end up being an accidental demographic for marketing (that’s even bigger than the target audience it’s supposed to be reaching), all in the name of “engagement”:
Test accounts set up last year by The Wall Street Journal found that Instagram’s recommendation algorithm served sexualized photos of children and adults to accounts that followed only young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other children.
When a children’s jewelry maker began advertising on Instagram, she promoted photos of a 5-year-old girl wearing a sparkly charm to users interested in parenting, children, ballet and other topics identified by Meta as appealing mostly to women.
But when the merchant got the automated results of her ad campaign from Instagram, the opposite had happened: The ads had gone almost entirely to adult men.
Aside from reaching a surprisingly large proportion of men, the ads got direct responses from dozens of Instagram users, including phone calls from two accused sex offenders, offers to pay the child for sexual acts and professions of love.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/instagram-child-safety.html
All the same factors enshittifying social media seem to also hold true of Roblox, with similar consequences. (I shudder to think of what’s happening in Twitter these days in its murky depths, post-Musk, given what he’s done to it. It doesn’t seem to be getting the scrutiny it deserves, thanks to Elno’s legal threats.)
7 Likes
Move fast and break things is one of the main reasons for this problem.
By the time the olds on Capital Hill realize these issues are a problem, the company had already made most of their profit. If a significant number of the representatives were in their 20’s and 30’s, this would have been started to be addressed a while ago along with looking into gambling being pushed in games and possible security issues with root level programs like invasive anti-cheat and the nonsense Crowdstrike did that messed up a ton of airports. The younger generation of parents do get worried about stuff like that
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
