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)
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).