Roblox is horrendous. It is as dangerous as any dark corner of the Internet, except that it appears child-friendly to parents. It _seems_ to have controls, and _seems_ to restrict bad behaviour, but it does not, and cannot. My daughter was roped into an online paedophile ring when she was 12. The initial contacts and grooming were made through Roblox... almost right under our noses. Every time we, as parents, looked at what she was doing, it seemed okay. We could have dug deeper, but did not. Luckily we caught it before it progressed too far, but some damage was done.
Wherever you can, tell parents to flat-out block Roblox.
Edit: Because people are asking how it works.
Roblox is a lot about bragging rights for individuals. You gain skins, trade for rare items, buy Robux for real money that can be used to buy items. Players flock around those that that have rare or expensive items. My daughter had a "super super happy face". I just googled, and it is current selling for $350. It makes them feel wanted and important. So just like fornite and skins in other games.
The groomers feed the celebrity, sense of community and so on to engage in chat. It starts as in-game chat, which you can never see the history of, before moving to DMs. The chat has tricks to get around removed words, so they all communicate in some sort of code that they all pick up along the way. Then they are able to divert them to other platforms where there are fewer controls. My daughter was made to create instagram account and an a porn one. Then they follow up on other platform calls (or phone calls) and follow the usual grooming techniques.
The trick is to identify the marks by how they behave in the game, and in the more popular, and social ones, I think that it is quite easy (in retrospect).
My kid plays Roblox. I disabled chat on it years ago (I spotted something and was 100% not having it.). She's still asking for it to be re-enabled and I'm still "thinking about it".
Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them?
These dangers exist to varying degrees in every system involving humans on the planet. This includes ones that are less visible to you than Roblox and come with more implicit trust, for example schools.
Not the original parent, but because you are tasking a literal child to have the ability to be able to understand extreme social nuance with an already limited understanding of social situations. Children should be made aware of some of these dangers, but overall, most children won't have the psychological or social tools to be able to properly handle these issues, especially when the in-universe rewards are so massive (fame and popularity in Robolox is something children really crave, a sense of belonging is pretty core to human psychology). From my perspective, it's all around healthier to disengage in the platforms that enable such toxic behaviors to take place, especially when the platform creators are fiscally incentivized to turn a blind eye.
The way parents talk about about children these days is weird. I hung out in tons of sketchy and seedy places as kid growing up in the mid-90s with the internet at home and I did not turn into a train wreck.
...or maybe that's the reason I'm hanging out on HN with the rest of you as an adult.
That’s a nice story of personal bias. You survived, so todays kids should too, right?
Well, times have changed and the creeps have gotten creepier and more organized. They have more channels, more ways to hide, more ways to collaborate, and more ways to do serious damage.
As for the 80s and 90s? I also survived doing some stupid and shady things on BBSes and the internet. I don’t want children to have learn the lessons I learned the same way. I also know people who didn’t come out okay. Who didn’t have a parent or friend check in on them, and got in deep in bad stuff and ended up in prison or dead. Don’t try to cook up drugs in your kitchen using a random recipe on the internet, kids.
I did too, but mid 90s internet was Disneyland in comparison. Phone phreaks and anarchists and warez rings aren't like the professional groomers recruiting for terrorists and pedophiles and slavers.
Children aren't stupid. Or at least they can be made less stupid by teaching them. They are surprisingly perceptive, and by the time they can chat online, they have little trouble with social nuance in my experience.
It's not a question of intellect; adolescents are emotionally undeveloped. It's extremely straightforward for a manipulative adult to find an emotion they are struggling with and offer them comfort.
This is obviously easier to do with kids that aren't getting the support they need at home, but it's still not that hard to do with those that are thriving.
Totally agree, kids aren't stupid. They also aren't generally able to sense and avoid insidious intent from adults adept at playing socially reprehensible games. I try not to treat my kids like idiots but that doesn't mean letting wolves in the door either. Not that that can be perfectly prevented.
Blame is for people who've hurt others. My child suffering some painful consequences of their mistake doesn't hurt me (I feel upset about it, but that's on me).
> Not a parent so this is a legitimate question: why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them?
Because predators are older and smarter than your average naïve kid. A few years ago I'm making breakfast for my wife (I work from home) and the doorbell rings - it's two town cops asking if I'm the parent of <my kid's name>. Turns out, some local pedophile had sent some dick pics to my 12 year old kid several months prior on Snapchat and they wanted to interview her. This was the first we'd heard of what had happened. We'd long since removed her from social media (unrelated to this event). And this was after spending countless hours repeating ourselves to death about not talking to strangers online. And yes we checked her phone daily...But Snapchat being what it is (disappearing messages), makes it more difficult to audit. She even told this guy what neighborhood we lived in. Since this was his first offense, the guy got 6 months probation and a permanent restraining order against him. Nothing ever came of it, and she's a few years older (and hopefully wiser) ... and the social media restrictions are still on.
In hindsight I wouldn't give my kid a phone until they were > 15 years old and even then it would depend on their maturity level.
It’s either allowing dangers of internet or allowing some peer pressure because your kid is “loser who not only is not on snapgram but doesn’t even have a phone and they’re in a second grade already”
Nope. We’ve checked her phone daily since she got her phone. You’d be amazed at how kids will complain for a few days and then just get used to the restrictions when they see that it’s their loss if they don’t comply. Another example, she wanted to keep her phone in her room at night. Nope, not gonna happen. “But my friends…” “Your friends are not my children, if you want a phone you turn it in at 10pm”. She complained for a few days…and now it’s just the routine.
The technique used by grooming gangs in the UK is as follows: get the child to do something the parents wouldn't approve of (smoke a cigarette, drink, do drugs, etc) and document it, use that documentation to blackmail the child into doing more. It becomes a spiral that the kid doesn't know how to escape from.
The way I hope to prevent that is to ensure that my daughter knows that, while I may disapprove of things like drinking, I'll always forgive her. I also make her clear on the line adults should not cross.
Besides that, I try to build her self esteem and street smarts as much as I can. In addition I have her question authority, myself included.
I love my kids, but at the roblox age, kids are assholes. Self Centered. Egotistical assholes. Their brains don't know any better and while you can teach them everything you could hope they learn, they have this chemical in their body that basically says "my parents are idiots and I know better" and they're going to make mistakes and do stupid things. The amount of unfettered mistakes and stupidity one can do on the internet is boundless. I didn't grow up with such boundless access to the world.
These roblox systems do not reflect reality at all as we used to know it. Kids used to draw something that their parents would hang on the fridge and they didn't make 350 bucks from it, nor did the entire world have access to my fridge to see their creations. If we played D&D it was with 4 kids in the same street or same neighborhood - our worlds were much smaller/finite. If some rando approached us - it was weird and we knew to say "no thanks" and move on - bit in the context of the internet - everyone is a rando.
At first, it was kind of cool to see kids create roblox groups, then use those groups to sell things and distribute the funds - but they became infiltrated and before long kids were addicted and they had to login and they had to create and they had to work.. and they stopped being kids... and old farts manipulated and took over these communities to profit off child labor.
But.. from a parents perspective. It just meant turning the roblox off. Pulling it cold turkey. You can block chat - then they hop on discord. And discord just makes things infinitely worse. Block discord and they're on twitter, instagram, pinterest, facebook, snapchat, tiktok.
THat desire for instant gratification and community at all costs then has them looking for other people in similar situations and that usually means self diagnosing things, searching for aesthetics or trying to define themselves in really weird ways with such fluidity that no one can keep up. Not even them.
So yeah, you can't teach this to kids.. Parents aren't equipped to handle it either.
Modern "free-to-play" games are so dangerously designed working not on just the core dopamine reward ratio (already known by Las Vegas for slot machine payouts), but incorporating false peer group pressure, "planned bullying" to get players to pay out rather than play for free, sunk cost fallacy, and probably a half dozen others.
As a counterpoint, my kid was playing a game on Roblox that taught them basics of avoiding fraud before allowing them to play. It was a game about trading animals. It is not all bad.
I have an eight year old and no matter how many times I explain the concept of sarcasm he just can’t get it. Even seconds after explaining the concept, I test him with an absurd statement and he takes it literally. I have made repeated attempts to teach him and he just doesn’t get it. Their brains are still developing
Really? I've been doing the Futurama "Good news, everyone!" thing with the kids for quite a while now and they twigged on pretty much immediately.
Obviously more subtle sarcasm is harder to pick up on, but even adults struggle with this, eg. Americans having a hard time with British "bone-dry wit".
You should definitely educate, but pick your battles. If Roblox is that infested with predators, and they are gonna be sophisticated, then maybe it is easier to avoid.
Even as an adult how many of us get scammed. Even cops do!
> why not try educating your child on these dangers and how to spot them?
You can certainly do that, but it wouldn’t be good enough. It’s like spear phishing, it doesn’t matter that 90% of people recognize the attempt and report it, the 10% that doesn’t is absolutely unacceptable (at least when you transplant it to Roblox).
Would you accept a 10% chance your kid is going to be groomed?
Schools also have oversight, accountability, hiring background checks, and almost everyone interacting with the children will have gone through years of education and training.
Roblox (and basically all social networks/games for that matter) are pretty much the wild west when it comes to moderation and protection of minors.
Adults get scammed. Adults "should know". We cannot expect kids to be better at spotting social engineering than fully grown adults. At least adults have other tools at their disposal to deal with the consequences psychological, legal, etc.
I guess the only way to 'fix' this kind of stuff is to go down the Nintendo route of highly restricted multiplayer interaction (friend-codes, no chat, etc.). And they probably will have to do that. Once the media and especially regulators get them in their sights (as COPPA violation in the US), Roblox will play ball real quick.
When you have a known hangout place for children, anonymous chat, and a corporation with the financial means to suppress bad press. It's just a recipe for abuse.
A somewhat contrarian view. I've always viewed Roblox suspiciously. However, at the same time, I believe it is fairly harmless as long as your child remains in the confines of Roblox and isn't lured into other social networks like Instagram, Snapchat or similar which I think can be effectively monitored and restricted.
I think that the big advantage of Roblox is that just like it is a decent game sandbox, it is also a good real life sandbox where children can safely learn about the online world, the risks and how to mitigate them (good passwords, never share your passwords, don't tell random strangers private information like your name, etc.). Assuming, I can prevent them from getting lured into other social networks, the worst that can happen is that they lose their Roblox account when they make an inevitable mistake. In my view, it's better that they learn these lessons in Roblox, at an early age, rather than later with social accounts or, worse, financial accounts.
Roblox' problems can be a useful educational tool.
You just replied to an actual experience of predatory behavior with the statement, "it is fairly harmless".
> "It is also a good real life sandbox where children can safely learn about the online world"
It's not, though. That's the point of this article and the comment you replied to. Again and again, it is _not_ a safe sandbox for learning.
You don't prepare children for the world by handing them off to predators with a "we tried" level of safety in place, you do it by removing the predators.
Or teach your kids how to avoid the predators, since predators will always be around.
I don't agree that the best course of action is to shield your children from every negative consequence of the world. But I guess I shouldn't be speaking as someone who doesn't have a kid. (We've been trying, and hopefully IVF will work.)
But I do have a lot of second-hand experience with nieces and family friends. Maturity level varies dramatically between kids, and it seems like a mistake to take a one-size-fits-all "Internet is scary" approach to parenting.
Kids will find a way to hang out with their friends. If you get in the way of it, you'll quickly find yourself on the losing end of a years-long battle.
Children are not little adults. You cannot place the same expectations on them as you would an adult. Education or not. I've personally witnessed my kids doing things they knew they shouldn't and were specifically warned against, yet were surprised when the outcome matched what they were told would happen. In this case it was someone offering free stuff via steam and my son's account was stolen.
Exactly it's the consequences of what could happen. It's good for kids to learn the hard way most of the time, but I'm not letting my kid swim in shark infested water so that they learn about the value of signs.
> Children are not little adults. You cannot place the same expectations on them as you would an adult.
That’s kinda the same for adults? I expect a lot from some adults, I expect basically nothing from others.
It’s not the fact they’re kids (e.g. under the arbitrary age of 18), it’s how responsible they are in general.
> I've personally witnessed my kids doing things they knew they shouldn't and were specifically warned against, yet were surprised when the outcome matched what they were told would happen.
I’ve done this many times (ignore what my parents told me), and been bitten a few times. But I’ve also been right that nothing bad happened an equal number of times. It makes sense to me they would keep trying, that’s what it means to be a kid.
That said, I’m a great fan of the saying “If it looks to good to be true then it probably is.”
Experiences to learn from aren’t created equally though. Getting your steam account stolen is one thing, getting exploited by sexual predators is quite another. Some experiences are good for learning, others may lead to long term consequences or developmental or mental problems.
The point people are making here is that your child is not on an equal playing field with the predator. The predators have an overwhelming advantage.
The issue isn’t the account getting stolen. The issue is my son giving what should be privileged information to strangers on the internet. In this case, the impact was a stolen steam account but it could easily have been much worse.
First of all, I wish you luck with your effort to have children.
It's almost a cliche at this point, but the prefrontal cortex isn't mature until between 25 and 30 on average.
"One key part of that trajectory is the development of the prefrontal cortex, a significant part of the brain, in terms of social interactions, that affects how we regulate emotions, control impulsive behavior, assess risk and make long-term plans. Also important are the brain’s reward systems, which are especially excitable during adolescence. But these parts of the brain don’t stop growing at age 18. In fact, research shows that it can take more than 25 years for them to reach maturity."
So, yes, teach your children how to avoid predators. That is excellent. But this is the last line of defense. Since children have major impulse control and emotional regulation deficits and the predators have a major asymmetrical advantage in behavioral engineering, it is overwhelmingly the job of the parents to the extent possible to just keep the predators away.
> "Internet is scary"
Damn right it is. Children are uniquely impressionable and imprintable for a long time. Seeing or being forced to do gnarly stuff at the wrong time is permanently disfiguring.
> Kids will find a way to hang out with their friends.
Yes, the traditional way that would happen is at someone's house. Together. In person. Which provides some level of protection against predation and a fuller/richer/healthier social experience. Where the venue is virtual those protections are lost and more vigilance is required.
> If you get in the way of it, you'll quickly find yourself on the losing end of a years-long battle.
There are wolves in the world. There always have been and always will be (as you say). It's a never ending and virtually thankless job (in fact, you will regularly be abused for doing it), but keeping the wolves at bay is parenting job #1. Get them to maturity whole, healthy, intact, and self-sufficient.
I'm not going to share experiences to the extent of the OP, but I have kids and I've met some wolves.
> It's almost a cliche at this point, but the prefrontal cortex isn't mature until between 25 and 30 on average.
It's ridiculously cliche and infantilizing. The brain continues to change through your entire lifetime. Not to take away from the rest of your post, which I broadly agree with.
There's a reason insurance companies charge substantially higher rates for coverage of drivers under 25, and it's not that they believed the first pop-science article they read.
> keeping the wolves at bay is parenting job #1. Get them to maturity whole, healthy, intact, and self-sufficient.
Keeping the wolves at bay is an impossible task. Reducing the exposure to the wolves, educating on recognizing the wolves, and mitigating the negative consequences of the wolves is a far more viable set of goals.
"Keeping the wolves at bay" means keeping them at a distance so they can't do damage; rather they can only bark and bay. That's not the same thing as reducing exposure to them; which implies they can still do damage, just not as much.
Roblox is not the predator. There's a learning opportunity for discernment here, if you child is mature enough for that lesson. If he's not, well, play with him to the extent you have the time.
Roblox is also a predator. They are exploiting children for money, through the user generated content and marketplaces. They take an incredibly large cut from everything sold and then have crazy high thresholds before you can cash out. Roblox might not be sexual predators, but they are predators.
If you do have a kid, you'll learn that every single experience you've had with other kids amounts to nothing. Having a lifelong commitment to another human and trying your hardest to make them the best person they can be, often against their own will, is something that you can't replicate with all the nieces and family friends in the world.
Pedophiles are extremely extremely clever and know exactly how to manipulate their targets. Just like spam, they don't go for every kid but they target the ones they know they can manipulate. If your child happens to be the target of a pedophile it's extremely, extremely difficult. We had some close calls on Roblox because my kid was an early reader/writer/typer so I was watching everything he was doing and cut away as soon as weird stuff started happening and then I deleted the app entirely. Now he's on Minecraft but I have a dedicated Minecraft server and only his friends play on it.
There are certain dangers that you can safely expose your children to with limited negative or even good consequences. Learning how to carefully climb structures at a young age is a great skill and if they fall down, they learn to be more careful. Learning your own limits at a young age is great. If they break their arm doing a skateboarding trick, that sucks, but they will learn more about conquering fear from bouncing back.
Getting conned into sending nude photos or being roped into the virtual hands of a pedophile are quite often things that kids have an extremely hard time recovering from. It's basically like sending your kid to play on the highway and expecting them to "learn" from the experience. "Well, they can learn how to be careful around moving cars!" is a ridiculous statement when the entire environment is dangerous and the outcomes are extremely binary.
It's easier to teach them how to avoid predators when they're much older, but Roblox is targeted for much younger kids.
It’s just that kids, despite their best efforts, are really stupid. Think about how much effort is put into teaching them to look both ways before crossing the street and that is an easy concept to understand.
I said it with the stipulation that the kids are kept within the confines of Roblox. Note that kids were lured elsewhere for anything serious - instagram, porn accounts, webcams, discord, whatever.
It also goes without saying that they need constant guidance, reminders, and monitoring.
I would love to figure out a way to filter this thread by who does and doesn't have children, and what ages, etc.
Either way, I have a 10 year old who's played for a few years now. Like many here, I really tried to avoid it, and for us, it was the pandemic. This is just where the friends were.
Anyway, I think we're doing okay with it. Back then, she was only allowed to play on a big screen-ish computer in a place where anyone in the family could she was doing -- and even "allowed" here feels weird, because this was never a discussion or a fight, that's just how things are for my kids, for now.
So I've peeped in on the chat a bunch, she just knows that sometimes I will be over her shoulder, and frankly I get a big kick out of putting on a ridiculous narrating voice for her little dragon role-plays.
She now has her own computer that she can play in her room by herself if she likes -- but, and maybe this is just our parenting thing, we can always go into her room. If the door is closed, we do knock -- but I've literally never been "rejected" here. In fact the only time I can recall her requesting privacy, it was a phone call with a boy (who we know, whos parents we know, etc).
So yeah, not that stranger danger doesn't exist, from here it really feels like this isn't much a function of "roblox" or even "the internet/computers?"
Are you able to go into more detail? I avoided roblox for my daughter as long as I could, but her cousins stopped playing minecraft with her, going exclusively to roblox. The inertia was eventually too much. I've limited her to a couple experiences and to only talk to her cousins, but I don't really see much control otherwise.
One thing I'd do is play as her character at times - the cousins should know you do it, and she should (hopefully) be fine with you grinding whatever it is Roblox's have. Anything untoward should also occur to you whilst playing.
And be completely open and upfront about the dangers, and how the "scams" work.
I think this is likely the best way to go about it, but offer some sort of reward for their transparency such as helping them achieve in-game goals, and maybe rewarding them for out of game accomplishments (good grades, cleaning dishes, putting away clothes, etc) with in-game rewards you normally pay for. At least then it's not some creepy old man asking for inappropriate things in exchange for a in-game reward.
Also make it clear, that you're worried about other players doing bad things to her that she might not realize is insanely bad.
When I first would use the internet, my mom freaked out one of my friends typed a little too fast, I don't know if my mom was right or wrong, I don't know how much faster I would of typed at the same age had I had a computer for a few years more, but she was like nope. Block them. So I did.
This is prime example of good parenting. I did something similar with my kids. I’ll let you play but I want your logins, in exchange for being transparent about your goings on, I’ll grind some for you while you sleep or help you defeat that hard mob. Sometimes even joining in on the fun myself with my own account to make sure the group is playing nicely. That all strangers are enemies come to take their loots. And that eve-online isn’t the only game out there with cunning scammery.
> And that eve-online isn’t the only game out there with cunning scammery.
I've recently met a few old school Eve players, I never joined back in its golden days, but basically that's been my take away is that everyone on that game was a sketchy scammer, extracting data and information from other players off the game to take advantage of their location.
Former old-school EVE player and sketchy scammer here. Pretty true, yeah, but keep in mind it's in-world scamming and is considered a valid or even respected part of the game. I doubt most of them would consider ever scamming or defrauding people IRL or find that remotely acceptable. It's a role play. (I stopped playing long before the official ability to exchange things for real-world money was available, though. For me it was all just exchange of shiny pixels.)
No doubt! Thank you for clarifying for those who might misunderstand. I've heard it described as a fancy game of Excel with space ships as well. What I was describing is people joining other Eve Corps TeamSpeak / Ventrilo servers and listening in for key details, and using that intel to rip off other players. Not anyone IRL.
Year(s) long spy operations and social hacking is a thing. You used to have to give away your API keys to your corp so they could verify you don’t have any alts in competing corps. Then the free to play disaster. It’s a free for all now.
There's one story going round where someone actually cut someone else's power during something important happening, I can imagine how that would get repeated wrongly over time.
My experience from years of intermittently playing EVE is that because it's only one server and you can't get your character renamed or just transfer to another community people might be roleplaying assholes ingame but the toxicity level is actually lower than in other games.
What was the concern about typing too fast? That the mom couldn’t monitor what they’re typing because they were submitting before she could finish reading?
Twelve year old me learned to type fast from flaming my opponents during StarCraft: Brood War public 1:1 Lost Temple matches.
Gotta type the message and send as quick as possible: those SCVs ain’t gonna start mining minerals or vespene gas on their own; supply depots won’t build themselves.
I was about to disagree, but I realized that 12 year olds typing fast is probably even more rare now than it was when I was 12. Let's just say, in the days of dialup lol ;) At the time, I typed faster than anyone I knew, other than a couple computer-geek friends who also spent hours chatting online etc.
My 14 year old types faster than most adults. And has been able to do so for a couple of years. She wanted the skill for the game One Hour, One Life and there are free typing apps out there.
I was about 9 or 10 years old when this moment happened mind you, I was typing with two fingers, one on each hand, nowadays I use at least three or four fingers per hand to type, which is a lot faster.
When I was 9, we had a typing class at school and I learned to touch type (i.e., 10 fingers) at about 20 wpm. By 12 I was up to 40 or more. I suppose I would have been blocked.
I don't think that you can play as a child character because you won't know what kids do, never mind understanding the actual game. It is how they interact with each other that is will be foreign to adult non-players. It is like, as an adult, trying to sit down and have a barbie tea party. After 30 seconds you're done and wonder how on earth it can keep a child occupied half an hour.
May I ask. As someone without children. Why not just educate your daughter on the topic of pedophiles? With that awareness, she can play whatever she wants.
To add on to what others say, not only are children naive, but you have consider pedophiles as adversaries not unlike you would consider a skilled hacker. Just like a hacker may set up an entire company page and prepare a series a mock interviews just to get a senior engineer to open a malicious PDF; so will pedophiles who target children online. They don't wear an "I'm a pedophile badge", it starts with a slow build of confidence and trust that someone without experience will be vulnerable to.
Also the kind of damage they make is worse. Companies can be rebuilt, money can be regained. Pedophiles start at “infancy trauma for your child” and goes up. As a parent, I would cut my own hand in order to spare my child from that. This is not an exaggeration.
This. The network of lies may be intricate. The child may believe to be interacting with someone their age that they come to consider their best friend.
Think of the elaborate long-term deception that can be involved in regular heterosexual marriages. Some people have multiple families that don’t know about each other! Now consider what it can be like if that same dark energy is applied to lying to a child online.
I our case, they didn't present as pedophiles (obviously). It was a kid that was the same age (obviously not). She believed that he was another kid with older siblings, that lived wherever, and was bullied at school. How does that seem like a pedophile? At some point he started threatening that he had a bigger brother that knew where she lived, but the nice kid would protect her... or something. Turned out that they were a ring operating out of Indonesia that would, at the right time hand over to locals.
You can't educate kids to identify pedo's. Online and in Roblox they are exectly the same as them. With siblings, parents that stop them from doing stuff, and so on. There is nothing remarkable about them to educate kids or yourself about.
Fair question and I had too when I didn't have my own. The best way I can explain is - Think how stupid and emotionally strong is the average adult, now scale by a factor of what you think a person who has a fraction of experience and emotional strength.
It becomes scarier once you factor in that kids' learning is not linear, and a 12-13 old kid is simultaneously dealing with hormonal changes as well and you have a situation that most parents can barely deal with!
Think how stupid and emotionally strong is the average adult, now scale by a factor of what you think a person who has a fraction of experience and emotional strength.
Counterpoint: the very phenomenon you mention could be a consequence of overprotective parenting.
By the age of 12, it's time to start explaining some uncomfortable things to your kids. Especially if you're going to let them interact with strangers (of any age) online.
Trust (2011) is a movie that shows us how the pedophile works. Trust is a movie about a 14 year old girl that falls prey to a man, and the process by which he got what he wanted.
My ex and I just talked about this and for the record, we both like how you think. We have a six year old together and she has two older children from a previous relationship.
We are going to:
a.) Educate her on the general concept of pedophiles.
b.) Arm her with specific tactics about specific communities.
c.) Monitor.
d.) Get her permission to constantly log into her accounts and play as her.
I'm thinking about introducing our eight year old to basic computational literacy, but I'm planning to have that be without any internet access at all. He can learn to type, write, program, do digital painting / photo editing, movie editing, sound editing, and 3D animation without general internet access.
How is playing online multiplayer video games a need for a child?
Even if you think it is for some reason I'm not seeing, why not have het play games where you can run a private server, so you have control over exactly who can log in and can keep an eye on things like chat logs?
Children now engage in play and social dynamics online. If your child's peer group engages in online interactions with each other and your child does not, your child will risk the struggles of bullying and isolation. Children are forced to be with their peer group for most of their waking hours and practice social rituals like hierarchy establishment, identity formation, boundaries, in-group/out-group dynamics, etc. with each other.
This is a really good question. I'll answer but if we could go back in time, I think we would make a different decision. To be very blunt, I think we fucked this one up.
At first, we started with a strict 'hands off' policy because we didn't see how it was a need for her. But then the pandemic hit and due to a variety of factors, it ended up being our best option for her to socialize with other people her age.
Private servers are great, but we discovered an interesting vulnerability that created a need to both educate and protect her. I was surprised by how many 'age appropriate' (whatever that means) Youtube videos provide detailed steps on how to connect to private servers.
That introduced a need to trust her completely. We have to trust her to never sneak away and never get access to a device without supervision. If we misplace our trust, she could end up a victim. We hope she doesn't and in reality, she likely won't, but I can only say 'likely'.
So now we're backed into a corner. Technical guard rails are one option but she's been obsessed with figuring out how things work since she was very young. Again, if there's a small possibility of danger, that's too much for us. So we're left with the least bad option - educate, trust as appropriate and verify.
Or alternately, some nice person on HN could build a parent time machine so we could go back in time and make an entirely different decision. The more time goes by, the more I agree with you. But again, we really fucked that one up and now that the cat is out of the bag, there's a risk that major changes will make sneaking around even more appealing. And again, that's just too much danger.
Ah. Speaking as a parent who has made many, many mistakes, that makes all too much sense.
I will say that longer-term I absolutely do plan to give my kids unfettered internet access. The day will come they need to learn to cope with it, so might as well have them do it when I'm around to hopefully be of some help.
One slightly out-there idea for how to roll it back - ditch WiFi entirely. Internet access is by using a physical cable at one or two locations in the house.
Harder to subvert, and the kids see that you share the constraint, so it may be slightly more palatable.
We homeschool. Our friends are about as careful with devices and children as we are, so far as I can tell, and more often than not we're seeing them in non-internet contexts like playgrounds and parks.
He does use the Netflix Kids interface to start the next episode of shows during their daily allotment of screen time (which we keep a close eye on, so they're only watching shows we approve), but he has no concept of the web or that he could use that interface for anything other than TV time.
In addition to what has already bern written, notice that children and teenagers often need to test limits to define their own identity and independency. So there are good chances that prohibiting something is going to make it even more appalling to them.
This is not bad on itself, I think it's a fundamental step of becoming young adults. And it doesn't mean parents can never trust children. But neither can they assume that what was discussed can be always given for granted.
It sounds like they are completely failing to scale their moderation teams with their platform. This is extremely dangerous and causes real harm. They need funded ML engineers, human reviewers, policy experts, product engineers, data scientists, and the will to protect people. Like any massive social network this is a moral imperative.
I don’t know what the current state is of their roadmap but I hope for everyone’s
sake that they get their act together quickly.
Actually, TikTok seems to do a good job. They understand they have a lot of children on the app and they take that very seriously as a responsibility. Unfortunately their solution is over-the-top censorship but it works better than other platforms from what I've seen. They used to have a "no politics" policy where TikTok simply wasn't a place for politics. They scale moderation by simply over-moderating and that is in line with their offering of a curated feed as opposed to a "platform" for arbitrary content delivery.
No politics? My fyp highly disagrees. However, the algorithm is amazingly good at keeping you in your political in-group.
You'll often hear content creators talk about "getting on the wrong side of TikTok" - meaning they started getting recommended to an out-group. (For example super cool super funny @melissadilkoateras ending up in MAGA feeds occasionally).
Cue brigading of reports, community violations, etc until the audience stabilizes.
I think the reputation is due to the zealous take down policy and the solid profiling that keeps you in your comfortable content window.
There's also probably not a single mega-platform that cares even a little bit about abuse. At least not to the extent of paying any growth or revenue cost to prevent abuse.
That’s a feature, not a bug. Not having moderation and proper customer service when you have scale saves you a lot of money. When all you friends play Roblox you don’t have good options.
It's likely less dangerous on aggregate than an AOL chatroom or the Catholic church. I'm certainly sorry for your horrific experiences and I am all for vastly stronger regulations for anything marketed to children. But abandoning an entire ecosystem because it can be used for evil ends is just not a sustainable approach to life. We'd be left with nothing.
Maybe Roblox is a unique and exceptional evil that requires a more severe solution? But more likely, it's just one of a thousand realms where kids might encounter danger, but usually do not.
I've played many many hours of Roblox with my nephew, and I've yet to encounter anything close to what this article is talking about. I rarely talk in that game, so I'm essentially indistinguishable from a child to any predators.
I've heard plenty of inappropriate language (almost exclusively simple cursing), but that's about it.
I don't want to discount the content of this article, but I agree that it's more likely "just one of a thousand realms where kids might encounter danger, but usually do not."
I'm not surprised. You could essentially build a bot to locate victims of child pornography/grooming by scraping the internet to find anywhere a roblox profile link appears next to a tiktok or Twitter bio link.
How is having a Roblox account listed alongside a Tiktok/Twitter account an indicator of CSA? I'd expect this to be a dragnet of all Roblox players who are 16+ and most likely to be legitimately engaged in networking/social media.
If you really want to find the CSAs, I'd suggest looking for the accounts openly soliciting vague "donations," and links to Amazon wishlists. Still a bit noisy (e-begging is not inherently e-whoring, but there is significant overlap).
Outliers might include links to P2P payment sites (Coffee, Paypal, Patreon, GFM, etc. Assume BTC these days too) but in general kids have limited banking mobility, and large sums of money discovered by parents erroneously attract drug trafficking suspicions-- whereas material items draw no legal attention, can be anonymously delivered by Amazon, and can be successfully attributed to "friends."
Also, be suspicious of your kids' friends-- even IRL ones. The only thing more deplorable than a pedophile's own grooming efforts are when they manage to turn their victims into recruiters. The trust is already there on account of a proxy. All it takes is a scenario along the lines of "your dad won't buy you an iPad? I have a friend online who will..." and the rest is history.
I suppose you could denoise it by starting from every Twitter and tiktok profile linked on reddit or a *chan site and checking to see if there's a roblox link on that profile.
Wait until they work out how build sheep fucking machines in Minecraft!
As for Roblox I watch with one eye open and educate them. It's a great environment to learn distrust for others, particularly in Adopt Me. They learned how to not get scammed fairly quickly.
There are a lot of very good, enjoyable games on Roblox. Bloxburg and Bee Swarm Simulator are two fun ones. There are also lots of horrible games on Roblox. Much like all the mobile app stores, you have to look hard and talk to friends to find good stuff.
Honestly, I think any online platform that has chat that children can be a part of it going to encounter the same issues. You can do your best to protect and educate them. You can talk to them about what they're playing; get involved so you are more likely to notice issues. But there's always going to be risks. It's scary, but I don't think locking everything risky away from a child is the right route either.
I tend to think of it like letting your child go to the park with friends. The risks are different, but the concept is the same; the only way to really remove the risk is to be watching them every second, which isn't overly realistic.
I don't know if the comparison really applies. In the real world, children can look out for each other, adults in the community can keep an eye. Sure, parks and things will be targets for sickos, but online games like roblox or social media like discord basically have giant billboards on them. There's no real way to police the behavior online like there is in real life.
I wasn't comparing the types of risk involved in each. Rather, I was saying that both things have risks, and there are things we can do to reduce/mitigate that risk, but there's no reasonable way to remove the risk completely.
There is a reasonable way to remove the risk completely with roblox and discord: prevent your children from using them. In fact, it is the only way to even mitigate the risks at all, shy of helicopter parenting.
That's like saying there is a reasonable way to avoid the dangers of going to the park; by going to a different park. There will always be online dangers, and "don't go online" is not a viable strategy to avoid them. From what I've seen, Robolox doesn't appear to be worse than other social platforms. Discord can be worse because it's really _not_ intended for children nor does it seem they put any effort into protecting children.
I go online all the time and the spaces I go into, I'm hardly ever confronted with sexually charged content and never solicited. Roblox is worse than other places online. So is discord.
If your local park is full of bums and needles and the predator registry map around it looks like it has chicken pox, absolutely going to a different park is the reasonable strategy.
This sounds horrible and I'm sorry for what's happened to your family. When you say Roblox _seems_ to have controls, do you mean that disabling chat doesn't actually work? Because I've tried to lock my kids accounts down as much as possible and had convinced myself it was mostly harmless.
It was two years ago, so maybe things have changed a bit. I don't think the game works well without the in-game chat stream. If that can be disabled then perhaps some of the risk is gone. It is still a creepy place with a lot of 'dating' in the game. My daughter was also introduced to the concept of a furry very young. She though it was more innocent than it actually was.
Roblox is disabled on the firewall. It will never be accessed again. She still plays games that are fairly locked down on xbox, and I trust the parental controls of Microsoft more than Roblox. I also put in a gryphon router to help take some of the load of us, as parents, policing everything.
Speaking as a parent, I try not to snoop on my children's conversions. If they find out you are snooping they will get very creative at hiding it. The most important thing is to know who they are interacting with and get to know their parents.
I think this depends on your children's age. If your kids are reasonable 15+, then sure. You shouldn't be spying on them. If your kids are 12? Then you probably should be.
This is less about spying or snooping and more about knowing children aren't mature enough to have private conversations with strangers.
At 12 or 13, I was being dropped off at the basement apartment of some creepy old dude who ran an Atari BBS and held open houses for the most engaged members.
From everything I saw/noticed, it was 100.0% on the up and up, but as a parent of kids that age now, the thought horrifies me.
Thought experiment: Do you think current-you could manipulate 13-year-old-you into doing something bad? If the answer is no, then that means you were mentally fully developed by age 13. To which I say congratulations, but that is definitely not typical. If the answer is yes, then you should understand the concerns that parents have.
I found this a very interesting question to ponder. I think the answer is "no," without cheating by having my own memories of myself at 13. Too many things that could accidentally give me away by not matching the vibe properly. The only chance of success would be finding a way to prey on the threat of parental overreaction and being less scary as an actual predator than over-controlling parents.
I think most of the time unsupervised children will be fine online. Sometimes they will get hurt, and perhaps very seriously hurt, by being unsupervised online.
Supervising your kid online is like putting them in a car seat even though you're unlikely to get in a crash. It's appropriate when they're young and becomes inappropriate as they get older.
I think children develop vastly differently from each other, maybe some others wouldn't have been doing "RP" until they were 17?
What if you were early?
I remember when I was 14-15 I wanted to play games and "hide and seek", whilst some of my friends had started enjoying sitting down and just talking, how boring.
We still played hide-and-seek at that age, but we would rebrand/reframe it in terms of a wargame with a name like "manhunt." This was decades ago though.
I haven't seen kids playing outside in about as long.
Oops the exact age wasn't meant to be taken literally, maybe I was 13 (was long ago). And wasn't hide and seek either (but other a bit childish things)
I feel like Hearthstone is a good example of the maximum amount of communication two strangers can have on the Internet. You can choose 6 pre-made things to say to your opponent; Thanks, Well Played, Greeting, Wow, Oops, Threaten. This might be too much; I have definitely seen people get mad from their opponent using the voice lines too much.
My thought is that this significantly reduces the richness of the in-game interactions (implies less engagement, implies less revenue), but doesn't need moderators to keep the game from being used for illegal sexual encounters, which is nice if your game targets kids.
One of my favorite games ever was Journey, and what I loved most about it was how communication worked.
The game was online-multiplayer, where two players would work their way through a series of puzzle-like rooms together. But they would match you with a random person and you would have no idea who they were, not even a screen name.
Then, the only way you could communicate was by making a little chirping noise. Tap the button and you make a little chirp. Hold it down and release for a big chirp. If you weren't looking at the other player you would see a faint glow in their direction when they chirped, so they could grab your attention. And that was it.
There were times when I would miss something and start to continue forward, so the other player would chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp to say "Wait, look over here!" I had no idea if they were pissed at me or being friendly about it, but given how cute the whole thing was I would assume the latter. It just felt nice, like I was meeting a new friend every time.
I've gone back to that game several times over the years, but sadly nobody seems to be playing it anymore. My first time playing feels like a once-in-a-lifetime experience that can never be replicated. Really great game.
Thank you for reminding me about Journey! I didn't realize it was multiplayer the first time I played it, which speaks to how well it was implemented (no matchmaking, no waiting, no usernames, etc - you're just playing the game and someone appears).
I still have fond memories of traipsing around the ruins in that game with complete strangers. The restricted communication made it more memorable for some reason. Plus, just a great game overall.
The latest re-release of it was for pc I believe, might have a better chance replaying it on there (waiting for a sale on your platform of choice may help).
Yes, essentially communication is a tool and any tool in a multiplayer game will be abused. Without playing any multiplayer Hearthstone, I can guarantee that some people would use "Well Played" after a mistake to insult players. Just like how in Rocket League people spam "What a save!" after an embarrassing miss.
I totally agree that it removes the richness. You lose out on any meaningful, even if small or quaint, connections, and might as well be interacting with an AI that triggers a "Well played!" at the end of the game.
There's no right answer here, it's an intractable problem since the beginning of the internet.
It reminds me of the Aesop's fable of the scorpion and the frog a bit. The problem is human nature projected into the internet.
> A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "It is in my nature."[1]
I think it's just an aspect of competition, and people's ego. In most competitive games, human psychology is just as important as any other aspect, and trash talk has been around since forever in order to tilt a player.
I don't personally view this as a negative.
It's the team-based games where kids are constantly yelling or berating their teammates for missteps that are far more annoying and negative.
The scorpion and the frog is my favorite fable, but I have no idea what the moral is supposed to be. It just seems like a hilariously nihilistic shaggy dog story.
As a kid, I remember it being spun as "don't mess with evil."
But as an adult, it seems like a rare (and perhaps valuable?) counterpoint to "don't judge other people" or "don't judge a book by its cover." Sometimes... those behaviors are adaptive.
It is weird because the scorpion, of course, dies too. And the frog was just doing him a favor.
I think the moral is supposed to be: "Some people are just irredeemably awful to the point that they'll self destruct and take you down with them if you try to help them" which... I guess is true but pretty jaded for a children's story, haha. Although, old fashioned fables do tend to have that dark aspect.
I came here to say this. In Hearthstone specifically, players were abusing "Thanks" by saying it after their opponents made a blunder.
Though, compare that to Facebook which knowingly allowed white supremacists to organize deadly attacks against BLM protesters, let ISIS recruit on their platform, and facilitated a genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. Hearthstone is doing pretty well compared to that.
Elden ring offers 20 or so templates for messages and the ability to chain 2 templates with conjunctions for example: “Beware of {noun}” where noun is one of 200 or so whitelisted words. Kids still find creative ways to insult other players.
But if FromSoft cared to moderate the messages they could; there are a limited number of combinations that can be made. FromSoft instead encourages the behavior (e.g. by always having a few dead NPCs hanging over a railing with the butt facing the player), which is fine because they make games for adults.
The annoying thing about Roblox is that they're really not trying to experiment and figure out what could work, instead hanging on to a chat model that kids definitely can hack around.
I think Among Us quick chat is actually the best example of this. There are hundreds of combinations of messages you can send along specific templates - “The body was in (location)”, “(player) was chasing (player)”, “Vote (somebody)”.
It’s enough to have a full discussion in the emergency meetings without any possibility that I can see for abusive communication. The only weak link is the player aliases themselves.
This works well with games like hearthstone because the game itself is well defined. Whereas sandboxes such as Minecraft, Roblox and MMOs such as Runescape, World of Warcraft would be greatly neutered by this restriction. An an example of this, the Minecraft community is currently up in arms about Microsoft's new chat reporting.
There's also an entire category of games games (2nd life) and non games (omegle) which are built on communication with strangers. For some people that's part of why they play these games.
I get what you are saying but I see this as pretty dystopian. It's easy to measure the harms that happen, but what about the other side of the coin? What about the friends you never met because you couldn't speak to other people? What about the legal sexual encounters? Maybe even love?
Especially during covid lockdowns when people were meeting much less in person than normal, social connection through games was important.
"I feel like Hearthstone is a good example of the maximum amount of communication two strangers can have on the Internet."
Hello stranger on the internet .. don't you think, you used a bit more than
"Thanks, Well Played, Greeting, Wow, Oops, Threaten" here?
I still understood you, though. Which is my point, I had awesome communications with many strangers on the internet. Whether in games or forums.
But yes, the average online communication is quite low and toxic. And I had to learn to walk away or ignore most of it. So for small kids it is maybe a good thing, if their games do not have chat enabled. Which means pretadors then can only contact them through whatsapp, instagram, facebook, tiktok,...
Pandoras Box is wide open already and blocking it all, means isolating your kid.
In Age of Empires: Age of Kings/The Conquerors this was called/known as taunting. You could either do this by pre-defined voice taunts ("Start the game already!") or in the pre-game chat and during the game.
Rocket League's quick chat could be comparable (even though there's also freeform chat) - however it's very easy to piss people off via quick chat as well (e.g. spamming What A Save during a missed save)
One of the challenges here is that the incentives are misaligned. It's well-understood in the cash-shop games industry that most of the revenue comes from "whales", users that buy large quantities. In a game targeted at children, who themselves don't have income/credit cards, it's unlikely that the "whales" are in the target demographic. Rather, it is likely most of the "whales" are adults who are spending large in order to use the in-game currency to exploit interactions with others.
Not only was this predictable, it seems nearly by design. I don't see how Roblox can ever fix this without fundamentally changing their business model. Their business model is essentially structured to enable commercial sexual exploitation of children over mobile platforms.
On my own network I used various means to make it impossible for anyone to use Roblox, music.ly, TikTok, et al. Services that are targeted specifically at children but provide a pathway for semi-anonymous communication are already ripe for exploitation by bad actors, the microtransactions aspect of Roblox just makes it even worse.
It's ironic, but platforms intended for adults tend to be safer for children, because they don't concentrate bad actors in the same way.
Correction here -- Roblox largely does not have whales. Most of the long-time successful games just rely on quantity of players (with logged gameplays reaching into the billions). That may change / be changing but among Roblox devs you still don't see the "target the whales" mentality of, say, mobile game devs.
It's also an absolutely wild assertion to say that a platform with in-game currency is encouraging pedophiles by design. I think Roblox is seriously screwing up here, but the way you're phrasing it, that's an inevitability rather than a series of mistakes and bad judgment.
Yes. Roblox absolutely is an amoral system to draw money from children, but it's not particularly focused on whales. Rather, their current big initiative is convincing parents to sign their kids up for a Robux "allowance," which is a monthly subscription that gives the kids a certain quantity of Robux per week or month so they can "learn budgeting."
Still, I would be really surprised if a big chunk of revenue didn't come from whales. That's just an organic part of how these sorts of things work. There will always be a small percentage of players who have access to money and feel okay with spending a lot of it on online games.
Well, prepare to be surprised, I guess. A big chunk of revenue doesn't come from whales (for almost all games, I can't speak for all but know a fair amount about the average platform success story). That's because of the history of the platform and how games were designed: in a lot of them, the only thing to buy was one or a few "gamepasses", which would unlock functionality. Once you bought the gamepasses, that was it, there's nothing else to buy.
The thing about whale-oriented games is that they're actually annoyingly difficult to design. You need, effectively, a game loop with an infinite power curve, content that's actually somehow worth playing for that time, and cleverly designed microtransactions that feel meaty but actually give the player very little.
That's hard to pull off and usually takes teams of experienced professionals and very well understood principles for whatever genre you're designing the game in. Roblox, by comparison, usually had small games, that are very different from anything else in the game industry, designed by one or two teenagers. Players hop from game to game rapidly and everything is lower and smaller than in other parts of the industry -- from retention rates to playtime to conversion rate.
More recently there are some games that are beginning to lay the groundwork for whales, kind of like you had mobile games like that in 2010 or so (when the predominant type of mobile game was still paid). It'll be interesting to watch -- Roblox obviously has a financial interest in whales, but IMO it would be absolutely idiotic of them to just stand back and let it happen. Not to say that they won't, there seems to be a fair measure of idiocy going on at the company, as evidenced by this whole "hire the furry porn guy for outreach" thing.
Sure, but look at Roblox experiences like "Adopt Me" or "Bee Swarm Simulator" with gacha mechanics. Keep inserting a dollar and pulling the lever, maybe you'll get the ultra-rare diamond flying rideable pet dragon bee. Those games are very whale-friendly and are pulling serious numbers. Heck, Bee Swarm Simulator has its own line of toys available at Walmart now: https://www.walmart.com/c/brand/bee-swarm-simulator
Yep, you're talking about the games I had in mind when I said some games are beginning to lay the groundwork. Notably, Bee Swarm Simulator was made by a grown-ass man who had (IIRC) mobile dev experience before going to Roblox. And within that genre of games he's been copied more recently by pretty exploitative stuff like Pet Simulator X. But that "simulator" / pet collection genre is one of the only spots on Roblox where you can find that kind of open-ended monetization and if you could see their internal stats, you'd see that they're mainly monetizing through quantity of players like everyone else.
It is worrying to think that kids might end up dropping thousands of dollars on a game, but I think if that does start happening, you're going to see it in the news instantly. Like I said, it is really idiotic of Roblox to even begin venturing down that path; they should be clamping down on that kind of monetization to stop it from growing, but so far they have not done anything except enforce basic loot box legal standards (must show odds).
That doesn’t seem any different from a normal allowance that they buy Robux with? And removes the intermediate step of me needing to enter my credit card details in exchange for my kids cash.
Whether you allow them to buy Robux in the first place is a different question.
Oh, no, it's worse. They assign "premium" status to kids who are on the subscription/allowance program. They get a special premium badge by their names, and games are incentivized to offer special perks to these premium players (the games get a cut if someone subscribes from within their game).
In my mind, premium is significantly better than open-ended free to play monetization. Subscriptions have been used for kids platforms before (e.g. Club Penguin), so it's not some new emergent evil. Roblox incentivizing games to treat subscribers better (and paying them for it; there is a subscriber playtime earnout) is also, arguably, an attempt to push the whole platform toward subcription revenue rather than casino style free-to-play revenue with the whales, addicts and so forth. The more worrying thing is that they might try to support both models, one is clearly worse than the other.
$2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period). "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average user in the user base.
In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for.
Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.
I'm sure lots of parents would reluctantly spend 2$ on an in-game purchase here and there, but that's not really a whale. To be a whale we're talking tens or even hundreds of dollars per day. Think of people getting addicted to those time restricted pay2win clicker games and impulsively buying in-game currency in dribs and drabs until they've spent a pathological amount of money.
GP is arguing that for Roblox, the whales are the pedophiles. Indeed pedophiles tend to be prone to addiction to predation or to hoarding porn. And they will similarly end up with out of control spending to groom more and more kids.
Whilst the issues raised are serious and I don't want to detract from the severity of the allegations, but I really take issue with putting regular porn and furry porn in the same league as pedophilia.
When your company's product is targeted at children, it is definitely weird when your social media director and your head of trust and safety both include porn in their public online persona.
Nothing wrong with porn, but it's relevant to this article.
I wouldn't let children on twitter, and as a child, I really couldn't have cared less about Lego's marketing officers twitter follow list. Is the expectation here that any public facing representative of a company that mainly targets children must lead a pegi 3 life? I don't particularly enjoy defending corporate entities here, but unless their twitter handle was supposed to be used in official capacity for Roblox, who should give a shit?
And again, unless the person in question shared smut with children, how would this be relevant to pedophilia? I am also not arguing that this is the wisest move on the part of the exec in question, it looks stupid, but there should be nothing indictable about this.
Ultimately, this is an article about exposing how a corporation through negligence at best and malicious intent is empowering child abusers to abuse children, why go the Jess extra effort and try and make these people look worse by pointing out that these people like porn?
it isn't indictable, but people are free to have a much higher bar than the legal system sets for what they consider acceptable standards to interact with their children.
you're free to post all the porn you like on your public social media profiles. parents are free to not really want you to be around their children.
the fact that you are legally free to do all kinds of things in this country doesn't mean that you can do them without any social repercussions.
the freedom of speech isn't freedom from criticism, and from other people's negative social reactions, it just says that the government won't throw you in jail for it.
"Freedom of speech" has multiple meanings. One is a question of law (e.g. the gov won't arrest you) the other is a statement of guiding principle (e.g. that it is good for people to feel able to express themselves).
The scope and worth of that principle can and should be debated, but it shouldn't be ignored. E.g. shunning anyone who expressed the opinion that maybe homosexuality shouldn't be banned would have been bad for social change.
There's a difference between broad societal shunning of someone for public expression of their sexuality, and wanting to keep things of that nature in the adult sphere of society and away from kids.
I think sex work should just be legalized. Roblox's head of content moderation should not be a sex worker though.
I don't have a problem with people having lots of visible body art. I also don't have a problem with employers not wanting to hire people who do. I don't think anyone is the victim there since its just the consequences of personal choices and should be seen as a situation which is working out for both sides of the equation (those people probably would never be happy at those jobs).
Based on your job you may be held to different standards than society at large and there is nothing wrong with that.
My bad dude i forget hn isn't the zoomers paradise all the other social medias is.
Jfc = jesus fucking christ (exasperated)
horny on main = being horny on ur main account. like the boomers who make thirsty comment on 20yo models ig posts without realizing it's their real names they're using.
freeze peach = messed up spelling of free speech used to mock ppl who whine MuH fREE sPeECH when they can't say the nword on twitter (literally 1984).
I agree that this article does seem to lump some behaviors together of wildly different severity. But when the job is managing and monitoring the safety of children in a massive online space, it seems reasonable, nay necessary, to judge them by a high standard. It doesn't have to be a crime, or even inherently bad, to be a red flag.
In this case, I find it very strange that the head of Roblox's Trust & Safety department didn't think twice about following indecent accounts on public social media account. Even stranger still, that a company who pretends to value the safety of children either didn't bother with a basic background check, or saw it and went "yeah, this guy's got good judgement."
I've got nothing against people publicly endorsing/following these things, but I'd expect this dude to have enough discretion to recognize that many parents would object, and keep it on a private account like a normal person.
Heads of PR for major companies have been fired for a heck of a lot less.
Sounds like an outdated perspective that should be challenged. Any adult should be free to discuss and share porn in a consensual and adult-only environment, with zero regard for their day job.
Horrible is the wrong word. It's like meeting someone and they stink.
In my experience the people who consistently fail to draw these lines also tend to end up being some sort of toxic to you and or your friend group and or your company.
Invite a friend who stinks because they don't shower? You're going to lose friends over it who don't want to be around it. Invite a friend who publicly displays porn? Same deal.
I have nothing wrong with people selling porn, but it's not remotely kid appropriate. Society expects a large berth between the two. If a kids company hired a porn-star to sell their products that would be weird, even if they didn't mention porn while on the clock. Similarly it would be weird if Roblox was also a joint venture with PornHub. This wouldn't hold if they were just Orthodox Jews.
I'm taking the claim of "sharing porn on social media" at face value.
I have nothing against producing, sharing, and consuming pornography but its typically done in private. A social media persona is public. It is inappropriate to share pornography in public. When that public persona is attached to a place of responsibility, then doing so is showing poor judgement. It's not at all comparable to being an orthodox jew.
It's genuinely distressing to me how the author has shoehorned in a suppsosed link between fictional fantasies published between adults on Twitter and actual child sex abuse and grooming. The fact the author chose to include these, as well as the dictionary rendition of 'loli complex' without delving any deeper into the reasons this subculture exists between adults shows a shocking lack of due diligence.
The fact that somebody likes gay furry porn and posts nude pictures of themselves in adult spaces has nothing to do with child sex abuse.
On the other hand, it isn't all that surprising; crusaders against porn and deviance frequently tie in far larger and more serious issues, but this author has done the opposite: take very serious issues of CSA and in order to inflame the reader's sensibilities feels he must mention that 'deviant' content.
yeah it really feels like sex-negative sentiment, slutshaming, kinkshaming, etc. not being able to distinguish sex acts between consulting adults from child abuse is... I mean it basically means I lose all respect for the person. Unlike the victims they're supposedly concerned about, I am not a 13 year old boy, I'm not reading your article to beat the dead 'furry is cringe' horse.
i think the author conflated "is openly sexual online" and "works on a game targeted at children". As you say, strong evidence in the article, cloudy delivery.
The fine article also calls out tweeting about Ponies: The Galloping, an official Magic: The Gathering product featuring characters from My Little Pony, as the sort of thing one would only do if they were a danger to society.
I agree, but then the issue is child abuse and should be clearly stated as such. Making vague remarks about someone's personal twitter account isn't that.
It's one thing if some random employee doesn't take care about a social media account that can trivially be associated with their company. But high-ranked executives, particularly in sensitive departments?! JFC it's not that hard to create an anonymous account on any social media site except Facebook.
However I think the main issue is that said person was using a "professional" twitter handle to engage in this sort of stuff. Sadly I suspect that the furry porn bit was added to make them seem more deviant. When it should be more a case of inappropriate.
yeah, the repeated references to furry porn - including a censored shot of what looks like absolutely bog standard bland furry porn - kind of caught me off guard too. like photographic child porn is record of child abuse and actual rape - furry and anime porn aren't even in the same league, and yet they merit being mentioned in the same breath here?
Does this author have some particular axe to grind with furries or something?
If, as you wrote above, "deviant" simply means "deviates from the norm", then gay people qualify as well. So it seems that you have some kind of "acceptable deviancy" list?
I was feeling the same, but then I saw the actual pictures posted, and I tend to agree with the general feeling (director out of line), if not the exact words (furry porn bad).
People downvote you like this sort of thing wasn't actively being discussed by conservatives even before RvW fell. Restricting sexual liberty is part and parcel of the republican platform.
This - definitely, any platform with a userbase that's substantially comprised of children and which offers free communication is going to be a complete disaster requiring ridiculous amounts of moderation and careful parental involvement.
It is clear that Roblox have failed to deliver the moderation capabilities necessary to market their platform as "safe," and are more interested in making money.
But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything?
And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and more investigation, or none at all.
This essay, and this substack in general, really lack focus - they publish dramatic exposés which are just a hodgepodge of random "dirt" thrown together, some interesting and serious and mostly nothing.
> But the jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows on Twitter, and another for retweeting some fan art that happened to be from a problematic account, are totally random and unfounded - what's that got to do with anything?
It's one thing to watch/engage with this stuff privately in your personal life. It's quite another thing to have:
>> Roblox’s former social media manager ran a public pornographic blog with “furry porn” and photos of himself
And
>> Roblox’s official verified Twitter account retweeted content from “DukeButDuke” with #FanArtFriday.
This is not
> jabs at Robox employees for furry-adjacent follows
This is Roblox's public representatives at a high level in the company publicly promoting this stuff. Put another way, if you posted a blog article about furry porn and pictures of yourself nude, then prominently displayed it next to your public work profile, do you honestly think that your company would have no right to fire you? There's a reason lots of bloggers that work for big companies will put "this blog and these ideas have no affiliation with company X" disclaimers everywhere, and that's just for semi controversial blogging topics.
> And the half-baked "money laundering" investigation distracted from the issue at hand and deserved either a second post and more investigation, or none at all.
Half-baked? It's enough if casino sites exist for a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws.
This is skin gambling, where in-game items are wagered by proxy, so the actual structure of the gambling is unfortunately somewhat nuanced.
I agree that it's unethical and Roblox failing to crack down on these sites by any means they can, again, represents a failing.
But I'd have liked to see a separate post with a deeper investigation into how the gambling sites are structured, and how the cash-out economy works.
Proxy-gambling using skins and secondary markets has been highly controversial since at least the CS:GO days and unfortunately it _isn't_ that clear that there's a serious violation of gambling and AML/KYC laws on the part of Roblox. Valve have been somewhat successful so far in defending themselves against the Washington gaming commission and many lawsuits surrounding CS:GO skin gambling.
But, Roblox have a direct cash-out program for in-game content developers which may change their situation.
I'd again, have loved to seen this investigated more in another blog post. This one was weirdly unfocused to me because it started with serious, well-founded allegations of inadequate moderation leading to harm to children, in contrast to "safe" marketing. Then it progressed to a random aside accusing a safety officer of being a furry (???). And then flipped to another aside about finding a gambling site.
Letting your child talk to strangers on the internet may not be the best idea. News at 11.
No moderation system is flawless. If you are going to let your kid talk to strangers on the internet, teach them safety like avoiding sexualized content.
I do find the digging in to the personal lives of the employees here pretty bad taste. Yes an adult can look at porn and have sexual relationships with other adults, whether they work at Roblox or Toys R Us.
Maybe be straight up with them instead of "shielding" them so they're not curious anymore. As a European I find American culture extremely prude. And anything that's "forbidden" is automatically interesting. For some reason I genuinely don't understand however, most people prefer ignoring these kinds of factors of human nature and just keep forcing their values and norms when it's clearly not working.
It’s so absurd. They call their children sneaky liars in the Anglo-sphere and then never tell them the truth in a silly attempt to “protect” their innocence. Of course they are sneaky liars?
Not sure if this is pointed at me since I made the sneaky liar comment from my Anglo-sphere but I never once suggested to dodge telling them the truth. In fact, I’d combine telling them the truth with “that’s why we don’t talk to strangers online” whereas the quote I mentioned was about “if you’re going to allow them to talk to strangers online”. That shouldn’t be an option for kids this age. You have to do more than talk with them. You have to monitor them. You have to know what their doing. You have to accept that you still might not get throw, because they’re sneaky liars and if they want to break a rule they will. That’s what kids do. These kids at this age can also be curious about sex.
Do you have actual parental experience that counters any of this because it seems you have strong opinions on how to parent?
Also it sounds like you’re taking it personal as if I’m name calling the kids. That means you’re definitely lacking parental experience because it’s a simple fact that every kid is sneaky and lies albeit to various degrees.
Streets are not exactly intelligent adults who are lusting after your children... Streets are not good to run into. Easy. This person who is nice to you online and has been your friend for the last three weeks might be fine or might slowly be grooming you. Hard.
And until they're old enough to understand the explanation and control their impulses accordingly, you use high levels of supervision and hands-on action in order to prevent them from putting themselves in danger.
For children below a certain maturity threshold, taking strong action to prevent unsupervised internet access seems totally reasonable to me.
So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are talking to, and they are failing, because they don't have enough incentive to put in the effort.
I wonder if there is an opportunity here to get a fully distributed effort going, based on web of trust.
Most users don't do web of trust verification even in apps which support it, like signal, because it's not worth the effort for general low stakes communication. But people are willing to put in a lot of effort to keep their kids safe. And the requirement here: "I want my kids only to message adults I trust, or kids that an adult I trust has verified are kids" is a good match for web of trust, because it's basically an emulation of how the mark 1 meatspace method of doing it worked. (yes, my use case here is for younger kids, older ones should be able to explore more and I haven't figured out how that would work).
> So, the issue here seems to be that we are relying on giant corporations to do the due diligence of who our kids are talking to, and they are failing, because they don't have enough incentive to put in the effort.
As a parent dealing with some of this currently, this isn't entirely how I'd put it.
Roblox is marketed for kids, and claims to have a large number of parental controls, but in fact they either don't work or don't exist. Most parents aren't savvy enough to know they even need to check for that.
Meanwhile, I'm extremely computer literate (a developer even), and have largely banned my kids from the internet, installed multiple blockers and monitors, and my kid still gets to shady places and content. It's f-ing impossible unless you are going to literally watch over their shoulder the whole time, which is wildly unrealistic and frankly immoral once they reach a certain age.
Please don't ban them from the internet. That's what my parents mostly did and I ended up going behind their backs on a device they didn't know was functional and I ended up doing some things I regret now. Talk to your kids. They need to understand where you're coming from and be informed about what's out there. There will always be workarounds for blocking, there's no workaround for mutual respect and consideration.
The curiosity for the forbidden/unknown is a powerful motivator for children. Destroying that magic by personally becoming invested can be quite effective.
The same applies for things that are "cool" or whatever the current term is. Either you become part of the "in group" and earn some of your child's respect or whatever you touch no longer becomes corrupted by your "boomer energy". Both are a win and far more effective than the cat and mouse game of training them to be mini pen-testers.
I once interned at an easily google-able Secondlife competitor. They fought against NSFW content for a long time, but then figured out how to fix it by:
1. Incentivizing users (with in-game currency) for reporting NSFW content, and
2. Restricting NSFW content to only people who bought an all-access pass (ID verified at time of purchase)
This opened up a new revenue stream for the company, and dealt with the NSFW content in one swoop.
A) I don’t think #2 would be A good idea for a kids game, and B) kids will absolutely start to game #1 with shill accounts and you may well wind up increasing the amount of ‘evil stuff’ as kids bring it to the platform for the sole purpose of reporting it to get Robux/swag.
This isn’t some low level SWE with an unusual hobby, it’s the person whom this company is putting out as the reason parents should trust the product. It’s absolutely idiotic on a number of levels.
If you're openly associating with pedophiles, you're not somebody someone should entrust the safety of their children to. Period.
The head of content moderation's personal interests are way off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good sense of what is moderate.
All of this is literally intuition, but we're being trained over time to ignore it in the name of sex-positivity and other nonsense. It's just grooming redefined.
> If you're openly associating with pedophiles, you're not somebody someone should entrust the safety of their children to
Retweeting art does not imply any knowledge of the "pedophilia". Also, "pedophile" is a term so general it's sometimes applied to things like finding people aged 17 attractive (which is the majority of heterosexual men). As far as I know the artist in question might just have liked some hentai that had a japanese schoolgirl in at some point. At that point the levels of indirection in your Law of Contagion are absurd even by the standards of believers in majiks!
> The head of content moderation's personal interests are way off-center. This does not paint them as someone with a good sense of what is moderate.
This would be just as accurate if the moderation head had an interest in gay sex.
> All of this is literally intuition
And your intuitions aren't anywhere near as strong as the intuitions of the 70s parents who made sure gay men weren't anywhere near their children. Should we have followed those intuitions too?
I think I don't believe anyone who just lumps furry porn, cartoon images of childlike anime, and paedophilia together. I auto-dismiss them.
Especially when finding the furry porn required an investigation into catching said person's non-work Twitter that was named pseudonymously.
You guys over-index on this nonsense because outrage is a drug injected directly into your brain. There's enough wrong about this platform that could be improved, but you're all more interested in just raging online and so you must invent this whole Axis-of-Evil. This, coming from someone whose sexual interests are pretty damned vanilla.
Wow, Roblox has text/voice chat! I've worked on a comment system before, it's basically impossible to block bad behavior using filters, AI, whatever, users find a loophole and continue with the behavior. Mods are super needed.
Text/voice chat + real money. It's a pedophile's paradise.
I admit I find the ferverent vociferations against ROBLOX as an entity somewhat disheartening; the game was cynosure to my childhood, providing precious experience to me in learning how to navigate social situations and cope with the rammifications thereof.
Pedophiles did, and do, exist, but this is a fact of life in any manner of social media or large community; discussing frankly how malevolent some may be is imperative, even if it does not preempt all danger posed. The alternative, stifling all manners of creative expression available to those who may otherwise be socially shunted, is untenable to me, as it does not line up with what my experience growing up using this technology taught me.
Nothing in life is without risk--exposure to this risk over a platform that's online, somewhat discoverable, and insulated is vastly preferable to keeping your kids blissful and unknowing of what would threaten them. Please do not attempt to parent in such a way that motivates your children to hide things from you and cut you out of the loop entirely.
My thought: online games which children are playing, especially ~13 and younger, should NEVER have text chat typed on a keyboard. They should only allow symbolic communication like "emotes" and symbols, abstract and basic stuff. Moderation teams can not possibly ever keep up with the "arms race" of determined scammers and exploitative individuals. Just eliminate the entire class of problems upfront at the design stage. Save your company tons of money, too, both in staffing and in legal settlements.
To Roblox's credit, they do take the "Club Penguin" approach: If you're under 13, you can only chat from a drop-down of chat options, and can only see messages sent using that functionality.
Now, that doesn't stop kids from lying about their age when registering, but that's another can of worms.
There are some specific structures and incentives that create situations that make it easy to groom children. We can work to correct those.
For example Scouts relies (desperately) on volunteers. So unfortunately the “trusted adult” is perhaps sometime TOO interested in volunteering. And the Scout group sadly doesn’t think deeply enough cause they’re just happy to have a parent volunteer. You can see how this can create a dynamic that attracts the wrong kind of person that want to groom families to prey on children.
Pretty much all hierarchies run into this kind of perverse self-selection bias. Power hungry individuals are more motivated to climb the rungs of politics than anyone else. The work involved aquiring the kinds of fortunes that make you able to effect change weeds out anybody who doesn't just care about money. Popularity based positions get dominated by narcissists.
Bad actors are just more dedicated than the good ones. It's a hard situation to fix barring the complete elimination of privileged positions.
Yeah part of the issue is that with the boy scouts or relatives you have a bit more ability to watch your kids or can hope someone else is there to watch them.
It's a lot easier for a child to be unsupervised on the internet. I know I could do a lot of what I wanted online growing up even thought my in person interactions were pretty limited.
Part of that was my parents unawareness about the internet but even if they were smarter about it I would have found ways to get around anything they put in place.
Yes indeed, but at least some of the acts described in the blog post would land "normal", non-stock-listed forum operators in front of a court: aiding gambling activity and child abuse are serious crimes.
There are numerous laws that detail the responsibilities of operating anything on the Internet that is targeted towards children, and Roblox seems to be completely ignoring these. Not to mention they are ignoring their moral responsibility of protecting their underage users.
Roblox needs to shut down Robux redeeming immediately and prevent any kind of interaction where one account has not been verified to be of age and accounts that have been verified, and maybe allow interactions between close age groups. It's not that hard to do so.
Shocked to hear the responses on here. This is disgusting, regardless of the blogs writing style or your opinion on furry porn, some of the allegations are pretty gross. If your platform aims to attract children as their primary user base, this crap should not be happening as often as it does on their platform.
Disney Toontown solved this problem 20 years ago. You give people a pre-populated list of things they can say, and that's it. There's literally no other way to protect kids on these services.
Roblox is extremely predatory outside of child grooming scenarios as well due to the fact that every game includes dark patterns in order to get them to spend money in order to progress because they won't get moderated. I imagine it would cause addictive behaviour.
There's a lot of "so and so did bad things" and "Roblox terminated his account".
Maybe they should be faster but I wonder if ultimately the solution that some folks would want is just no communication for kids apps ... I've got mixed feelings about that.
My kids play Minecraft but they are not allowed to join servers with strangers. I set up some servers where they have freedom to do what they want but the only people they are allowed to play with are their friends from school and family.
who could've foreseen that a microtransaction-based multiplayer user-generated content platform designed for children (with the ability to cash out in-game currency to real money(?!)) could've led to these sorts of problems
Similar issues have existed on lightly or unmoderated online games since the dawn of time. Would you support banning Minecraft for the same reason? I think games that encourage technical and creative thinking stand to benefit more than they harm.
They absolutely require closer parental supervision, though. Moreover, the developers at this company need to crack down on pedos both from without and (according to the article) within.
You might as well ban the internet too. And all phones. While you are at it make them where a gag when traveling between home and school to prevent them from talking to strangers.
If I prohibit my kids from going down a particularly unsafe street, that doesn't mean I'm against roads and sidewalks. Curious what stake you've got in this that you'd reply with such ridiculous hyperbole.
My young son started telling me about his friend from Florida that he started talking to. I am from Canada and across the country so questioned if the person he was talking to was a real child or some pedophile. Thankfully he video called her soon after and it was another 10year old girl and they just liked to play online but it definitely worries and and I’m not sure how Roblox can tackle the issue.
I don’t quite understand what produces the value of these Roblox items? As far as I’ve seen anyone can download the toolkit and build their favorite hat.
Sadly my nine year old daughter is addicted, and have trying "soft" measures to get her away from it (like buying a Switch and Animal Crossing) but all her friends are on Roblox. Has anyone seen any good videos for kids that explain the negatives of Roblox, and tried any successful methods with their children?
We originally locked the account down to try and keep her safe.
With commuication off and the account limited to only th Roblox verified games we thought we were okay.
It turns out that even in those games there’s usually an ability to change a “nickname” which allows users to chat by just updating their nickname.
As a dev I know how straight forward it would be to stop this frok happening.
Upon discovering the problem I contacted Roblox support and we pulled the kid out of Roblox.
Fyi; roblox support is not good, when the problem relates to child safety they pull all the classic tricks to make it seem like a “you” problem. They blame the third party “experience” developer, despite the game being vouched for by roblox. They close tickets after a short period with no response. They also treat this widespread issue (using nicknames to chat) as an individual breach of ts & cs, rather than fixing thr problem. Blaming the end user, who’s usually younger than 12.
Given the age of my and other kids I’d assume they’re violating GDPR & other global data protection laws on a regular basis.
That is shocking! It is an 'unknown unknown' thing that as parents we would be totally unaware of, but will somehow be communicated in game, or in hundreds of hours of youtube videos that kids watch. You think that it is all locked down, but can never be sure.
Also, as a company Roblox is evidentially a bad actor. I would rather trust Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony parental controls. Not that they are perfect, and don't make mistakes, but their business models don't run on whatever Roblox Inc does.
There is no good reason for kids to have tablets and smartphones, and parents who give those devices to their kids are bad parents. Those parents also make it hard or impossible to make that choice myself as a parent, because I also don't want my kids to be the odd ones out or social pariahs.
There is also practically no good reason for adults to own such things, as they are designed to fritter away your attention on the cheapest content possible (generally old, re-hashed "community generated" content).
There are two video investigations from People Make Games into economic aspects of Roblox in particular child labor/exploitation and monopolistic aspirations via platform capitalism.
Wherever you can, tell parents to flat-out block Roblox.
Edit: Because people are asking how it works.
Roblox is a lot about bragging rights for individuals. You gain skins, trade for rare items, buy Robux for real money that can be used to buy items. Players flock around those that that have rare or expensive items. My daughter had a "super super happy face". I just googled, and it is current selling for $350. It makes them feel wanted and important. So just like fornite and skins in other games.
The groomers feed the celebrity, sense of community and so on to engage in chat. It starts as in-game chat, which you can never see the history of, before moving to DMs. The chat has tricks to get around removed words, so they all communicate in some sort of code that they all pick up along the way. Then they are able to divert them to other platforms where there are fewer controls. My daughter was made to create instagram account and an a porn one. Then they follow up on other platform calls (or phone calls) and follow the usual grooming techniques.
The trick is to identify the marks by how they behave in the game, and in the more popular, and social ones, I think that it is quite easy (in retrospect).