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Roblox, Discord sued after 15-year-old boy was allegedly groomed online before he died by suicide (www.nbcnews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 59 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Roblox should be sued for alot of things, this is one of them.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Why? It's idiotic to force age verification and an ID to play games on the internet, and I'm assuming the kid didn't just click a button to turn off parental controls. He probably got his parents to do it. Liability shouldn't be pushed off to others every time something bad happens. This is the groomers fault. Not a game company or an internet provider or anyone else. Hell; why not sue Intel for making a processor that allowed the game to be played and discord to be used? Do you also expect every startup game company and Indy dev to have millions of dollars worth of chat security and oversight? Shit like this is nothing but a money grab.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    This isn't an age verification problem, its a moderation problem. A massive one. There's hundreds of games that exist almost entirely for the purpose of grooming ppl (a common one is so called "bathroom simulators" iirc) and roblox frequently doesnt do anything about them until there's public outcry about ine particular game, no matter how many reports come in or how obvious it is.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Game companies shouldn't have to monitor and supervise children. Each kid already has adults legally responsible for them. It isn't a g companies job to do someone else's job for them, nor be financially responsible for criminals or parenting.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago

    A game made for kids should not allow sexually explicit material on their platform. And, in fact, they don't, this kind of content is very clearly and explicitly against roblox's content policy but they fail to enforce it.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Parents fail all the time, that's when the government needs to step in and take action, in this case by making sure kids can safely play the game. And I disagree, Roblox's entire business revolves around children, they make money off them at every step and they even pay kids to make content for their platform; they should be and they are rightfully being held accountable for what happens on their platform.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    This is a lawyers cash grab. Why should it get put on Roblox? Why not the parents or the pedo or the IP or the electric company?

    Also, Roblox business hasn't been just children for quite a while. It's been around and popular for too long. Nearly 1\3 of the player base is 17 and over. A lot of the 12 year olds who started playing a decade ago didn't stop playing.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    why not sue Intel for making a processor that allowed the game to be played and discord to be used?

    actually, lots of people are taking this approach

    actually, restricting what operating system you can run on your smartphone is exactly that. you can only run stock android/iOS (if you don't want a whole lot of other stresses) and those in turn restrict what apps you can run on them ...

    it's not a good way, let me tell you, i just wrote an article about why this is so bad yesterday (it's not finished yet or i'd post it here)

    to sum it up: we need generic computing devices ("general purpose computing device") that you can run any software on. (this includes installing any operating system you want trouble-free). there's philosophical background to that idea, including "the software must act in the interest of the user, and since the hardware can't know the user's interest, it must be open to any software".

    right now, android/apple phones are not that. they're targeted at one specific operating system. we need a label "general purpose computing device" that is applied as an attestation of good quality to phones that can run any operating system (trouble-free). this especially includes unlocking and re-locking the bootloader.

    possibly this isn't for everyone, but it should at least be a possibility. :D

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