For many families, Roblox is supposed to be a harmless escape into the digital world, a space where nearly 40 million children under the age of 13 can play, build, and socialize with each other.
Increasingly, however, they are learning that the safeguards in place are thinner than advertised. The flurry of lawsuits filed against the company by individuals and state officials describes children exposed to grooming, sexual content, and predatory behavior in spaces marketed as safe for young users. These stories are the consequences of a system that has failed to take online safety seriously enough.
Individually, each lawsuit might be dismissed as an edge case. Collectively, they point to a deeper problem. The Louisiana Attorney General recently sued Roblox, arguing it has failed to adequately protect children from predators on its platform. The Attorney General of Kentucky has also sued, pointing out that children are playing games that simulate the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
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When the same pattern repeats, the story stops being “isolated misuse.”
Roblox did not set out to create a dangerous environment, but intent matters less than outcomes. Roblox is not simply a game; it is a sprawling social platform that introduces children to strangers, enables private messaging and voice chat, and relies heavily on user-generated content. These features drive engagement and profit, but they also create opportunities for abuse.
The incentives for companies like Roblox to succeed must align with responsibility for their users. When platforms profit from massive child user bases but do not fully internalize the risks that come with them, families pay the price. The cost is not only borne by individual victims, but also by communities, schools, and law enforcement systems that must deal with the fallout when online harm spills into the real world.
The human cost can be life-altering, and in the worst cases, fatal. This past October, a thirteen-year-old, Jay Taylor, was goaded into livestreaming his own suicide by a malicious online group.
Roblox itself has reported submitting more than 1,000 potential exploitation cases to NCMEC in just the first half of 2025, and law enforcement regularly runs nationwide operations in the hundreds of thousands.
Children who are groomed or exploited online do not simply log off and move on. The damage is lasting, and it undermines trust in institutions that families rely on, whether they be technology companies or regulators who are supposed to ensure a basic level of safety. A society that shrugs at these failures is tolerating negligence at best.
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The solution does not require speech policing or bureaucratic micromanagement, but it does require a clear duty of care for platforms that profit from children. The government has a legitimate role in setting clear expectations and creating incentives that reward responsible behavior. That can mean age verification and transparency requirements for platforms and cooperation with law enforcement to pursue cybercriminals who exploit children across platforms and borders.
However, they will not defeat predators on their own. These actors adapt, coordinate, and move victims across platforms the moment safeguards tighten. The real question is whether platforms treat child safety as a living operational mission instead of a compliance checklist.
Companies like Roblox must invest seriously in trust and safety, but not by treating it as a box-checking exercise or simply adding more staff to approaches that have already fallen short. What’s needed is greater capability: more sophisticated, vigilant, adaptive systems that allow trust and safety teams to identify and mitigate harm earlier, more precisely, and at scale.
Digital platforms do not merely exist in a vacuum; they profoundly shape social development. The tools to confront these risks already exist, but so far, companies have lacked resolve.
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These lawsuits are a warning to every company in this space that when platforms fail to meaningfully internalize their responsibility to safeguard users, the government can and will step in to protect them. But if companies act now, they must do so by fundamentally strengthening how they prevent harm, not merely signaling good intentions.
If the online world is going to continue expanding into every corner of childhood, then companies, parents, and policymakers must all take seriously what is at stake.
Aiden Buzzetti is the President of the Bull Moose Project
