Legal matters are no laughing matter, especially when people have been seriously hurt by the accused parties. What does this have to do with Roblox? A lot, actually. You may recall that we’ve been covering many aspects of the “legal side of things” regarding the gaming title, and in recent weeks, the number of accusations and claims against it and other platforms tied to it has been growing. One of the biggest situations recently was the Florida Attorney General subpoenaing the company for key documents about how it’s actually trying to protect the young player base within the title. Now, a family from California is adding in a lawsuit against both the game and Discord.
As noted by Fox 13, the basis for this lawsuit is that Roblox and Discord failed to protect a family’s daughter from adult predators, who used both services to “groom” her and exploit her. We don’t need to go into the details on this, but the evidence that the family has to prove the lack of safety protocols seems to point to this being a legit case, as their lawyer noted:
“A young girl has been forever traumatized because of how these platforms are built and operated. But this is not just about one child. It’s about the systemic failures of billion-dollar companies that continue to ignore glaring risks to their youngest users.”
The company has noted many times in the past that about 40% of its player base is under the age of 13, which means that 60% of it is above that, with many being adults. That’s plenty of reason to ensure that the game’s younger players are protected from those who would wish them harm in any way. The dev team has claimed many times that it does have protections in place, but those claims have also been disproven in many ways.
Recent studies, for example, showed that adults can easily subvert and override some of the safety protocols to do “malicious things” should they want to. That goes double for things like the chat feature, which can be filled with adults doing various inappropriate things despite the dev team saying that they’ve had measures in place to stop such things.
That doesn’t even talk about the microtransaction element, where many kids can easily buy things without parents’ permission, leading to massive bills that the families weren’t authorizing.
What happens next is up in the air, but if more lawsuits like these pop up, it won’t be good for the company.
