Louisiana sued the online gaming platform Roblox on Thursday, alleging the wildly popular site has perpetuated an environment where sexual predators “thrive, unite, hunt and victimize kids.”

Louisiana

The state of Louisiana has filed a lawsuit against the online gaming platform Roblox, alleging that the company does not do enough to protect children from sexual predators. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Merle cited incidents involving the state's Internet Crimes Against Children task force as a catalyst for the legal action, including a case where an individual used Roblox to impersonate a minor and target children.

The lawsuit claims Roblox prioritizes increasing user engagement and profitability over implementing sufficient safety measures, noting that nearly 60 percent of its users are aged 16 or younger. Roblox responded by stating it does not comment on pending litigation but denied intentionally putting users at risk and highlighted the challenges of combating bad actors online. The Attorney General argued that Roblox has not done enough compared to other platforms, particularly in reporting incidents to relevant authorities.

Louisiana sues Roblox, alleging app fails to keep kids safe

In our tech lead, a lawsuit against the popular video game, Roblox, alleges the platform allows sexual predators to victimize kids. The state of Louisiana filed the lawsuit, and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Merle joins me now. Attorney General, I really appreciate your time, especially as a parent who sees this game often on the TVs in his home. To start with, what precipitated this? Was there a single event that kind of prompted you to move forward here? Well, you know, we've had some incidents here involving our Internet Crimes Against Children task force that drew some attention to this platform, this app in particular. And we had a situation in one example of that where the parish sheriff was executing a warrant and encountered an individual who was masking his voice as a 14-year-old girl while he was actively using Roblox to prey on young children. Your lawsuit alleges the company prioritizes profit over child safety. Do you have specific examples that are really kind of at the core of this? Look, there's a lot of examples of that. I think that everything about this particular app's growth and all the way through when the company went public, you know, everything they do is designed to increase user engagement numbers, which increase their profitability. And about 60 percent, almost 60 percent of the users that are enrolled to use Roblox are 16 or under. That's an enormous amount of exposure to liability and an enormous amount of exposure for sex predators to get access to our children. Also an enormous amount of responsibility for a company, you'd think. Roblox's statement about this lawsuit begins by saying they don't comment on pending litigation, but it also says any assertion that Roblox would intentionally put our users at risk of exploitation is simply untrue. No system is perfect, and bad actors adapt to evade detection, including efforts to take users to other platforms where safety standards and moderation practices may differ. Do you think it's true that bad actors will always adapt to any safeguards a tech company puts into place? I mean, I think they'll try, but there's still a lot of safeguards they have in place. So it's simply not true that they've done everything that they can do. I mean, that's just flatly false. From the time they started this app, from 2009, I think, to 2016, I don't think they made a single tip or forwarded a single tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. So, you know, other apps do that. You can just look at those statistics and see the dramatic difference in the way that Roblox operates compared to other apps. You know, I just don't think that the facts bear out their statements that they are doing everything that they can do. In fact, I think what they show is they're not doing, they're doing the most, the minimum that they can do, and that that keeps their engagement numbers up. Well, we'll certainly be watching going forward. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Merle, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for having me.

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Breakdown