Pushing Buttons: With the safety of Roblox under scrutiny, how worried should parents be?

Millions of children play on this platform accused of having reams of troubling content and users, but there are hundreds of better alternatives that serve kids’ curious minds

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Right before last week’s newsletter went out, a short-selling firm called Hindenburg Research published an extremely critical report on Roblox. In it they accused the publicly traded company of inflating its metrics (and thereby its valuation) and, more worryingly for the parents of the millions of children who use Roblox, also called it a “pedophile hellscape”. The report alleges some hair-raising discoveries within the game. The researchers found chatrooms of people purporting to trade images and videos of children, and users claiming to be children and teens offering such material in exchange for Robux, the in-game currency. Roblox strongly rejects the claims that Hindenburg made in its report.

Roblox, for those unfamiliar with the title, is not so much a game as a platform (or, as its corporate communications people would like you to think of it, a metaverse). It claims to have 80 million daily users (a number Hindenburg says is inflated). You log in, customise your avatar, and from there you can jump into thousands of different “experiences” created by other users – from role-play cities to pizza-delivery mini games to cops-and-robbers games to, unfortunately, much less savoury things like Public Bathroom Simulator (which the creator said they made when they were 12 “before I was aware bad people even existed”). Because games on Roblox are created by players, the site must be constantly moderated. The company’s moderation team deals with a tsunami of content ever day.