Please don't make excuses for literal evil p*dophile megacorporations. There is plenty of low hanging fruit, and even if there wasn't, this issue is important enough that if they can't fix it they should go out of business.
1. They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts. Done. Problem fixed. Oh, but they'll lose money, won't they? That takes precedence over child safety.
2. The community is willing to help. You can find examples of independent actors uncovering tens of thousands of NSFW communities and accounts and submitting them to Roblox with detailed descriptions of the activities of each one, only for Roblox to perma-ban AND SUE the people doing the investigations, and not ban the offending accounts.
3. They can build an actual strong safety team. A $40B company can afford to throw a few million dollars per year to hire 200 people to do that same investigatory work. This is typical tech firm behavior, where they believe every problem can be automated away, and they're not willing to do the minimal amount of manual labor.
1. Kids under 9 can use chat with parent consent, for kids over 9 don't even need that. After 13, there's no option to even disable it for parents [1].
2. Suing multiple youtubers who come to you with evidence of child abuse on your platform does not square with "they do" in any concievable universe [2] [3]
> To use Communication features like Experience chat, Voice chat, and Party chat, all users must successfully complete an age check.
your words were "They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts". which they have. all "non age verified accounts" cannot use chat.
i have never attempted to assert that Roblox is a completely safe platform, or indeed that their safety team is as effective as it could be - however, your flippant statements were provably untrue with any research.
as for Schlep - while i applaud his stated aims, he was effectively "baiting" predators, offering to move conversations off-Roblox through platforms like Discord to bypass the moderation enforced by Roblox. in general, i fundamentally hate the idea of predator hunters; it seems so strange to monetize justice in this way, especially when it seems they care more about the content than the outcome of their "cases"
I should've worded this better. By "non-verified accounts" I mean basically mean "accounts that haven't been verified by an ID check". This is the only means that I consider an actual verification, face/photo scan is a PR stunt and malicious compliance.
I assume I don't have to try too hard to convince someone on this forum how easy photo/video verification is to bypass. Look at Australia, it's happening en masse right now.
Most age verification systems guard against children pretending to be adults. If we're talking about social media, this is a fairly low stakes thing, and false positives aren't too critical - sure, a teen will bypass the Instagram age-check and use Instagram, big deal.
Here you're trying to guard against the exact opposite - adults pretending to be children. Not only are the stakes way higher as there's no legitimate reasons to try and bypass the system, you also don't have access to the only reliable method - government ID checks.
Edit: I can concede the point about Schlep, as what he does is dangerous and I could see someone "follow in his footsteps" and ge thurt. However you have to keep in mind that he's never the first to talk to these people -- there's so many of them that he's literally had dozens of them approach him. I was mainly thinking of Ruben Sim, who compiled a large database of NSFW accounts without any real world interaction, and was banned and sued for it.
yeah, i agree with your points on age verification. ironically, the main backlash from the Roblox community was that they were even rolling out verification in the first place - not that it didn't go far enough! i'm sure you'll agree it's a tricky problem to solve - if communication is fully banned, then many children will simply move to lesser-moderated platforms.
i'm not a Ruben Sim fan. while his list of "ERPing" accounts is a good idea, and it's amazing to see real games implement blocks on these players, i find his opinions on the furry community strange and a bit obsessive
I think one approach would be that all communication features could be opt in, by parents. but, that doesn't actually "solve" anything, since predators just make child accounts for themselves, and opt in.
sounds like your solution would have to be "no children communicate on the internet".
> Please don't make excuses for literal evil pdophile megacorporations.*
I hate Roblox with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns, and wish they and their business model to be utterly destroyed.
But allowing our emotions to override our objectivity is not the solution. It's important to be as fair and objective as possible if we want our arguments to be taken seriously.
1. They can just disable chat for non age verified accounts. Done. Problem fixed. Oh, but they'll lose money, won't they? That takes precedence over child safety.
2. The community is willing to help. You can find examples of independent actors uncovering tens of thousands of NSFW communities and accounts and submitting them to Roblox with detailed descriptions of the activities of each one, only for Roblox to perma-ban AND SUE the people doing the investigations, and not ban the offending accounts.
3. They can build an actual strong safety team. A $40B company can afford to throw a few million dollars per year to hire 200 people to do that same investigatory work. This is typical tech firm behavior, where they believe every problem can be automated away, and they're not willing to do the minimal amount of manual labor.