Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is taking further legal action against gaming platform Roblox, adding to the dozens of other lawsuits against the company from families across the nation with similar allegations.
Uthmeier’s office has a separate criminal investigation into whether Roblox’s actions—or lack of action—allowed or aided predators in targeting children. The Florida attorney general’s new lawsuit accuses Roblox of deceiving parents, failing to protect children from being groomed by predators and seeing graphic content, and misrepresenting its safety.
“What we found is unacceptable,” Uthmeier said in an X post. “Roblox aggressively markets to young children but fails to protect them from sexual predators. … Roblox broke the trust of parents, and my office will make sure they answer for it.”
In some of the other cases across the country, the attorney general’s complaint said, children were abducted and sexually abused.
Roblox, in a statement to The Epoch Times, called Uthmeier’s lawsuit a fundamental misrepresentation of how it works.
“Roblox is built with safety at its core. We have advanced safeguards that monitor our platform for harmful content and communications. Users cannot send or receive images via chat, eliminating one of the most prevalent opportunities for misuse seen elsewhere online,” the statement reads in part.
Some of the safeguards listed on Roblox’s website include using artificial intelligence to monitor, block, or remove content violating the company’s standards. In early January, Roblox plans to roll out age checks globally before any user can access the platform’s chat function.
Meanwhile, Uthmeier’s lawsuit alleges that children can easily access games on the platform that feature disturbing sexual content.
Roblox’s new age-check feature will be done through a “facial age estimation” or ID verification that requires users to take a photo of themselves to match the image on their ID, the website said. Once the age check is complete, the user will be able to use Roblox’s chat function only within a similar age group.
Roblox’s current settings do not allow adult users to message users under 13.
“No system is perfect, which is why we continue to evolve and work to strengthen our protections every day,” Roblox said in the statement.
The lawsuit alleges that the company began implementing “basic” security measures only in the face of growing public outcry.
Roblox already has software on the platform to verify age and identity but failed to implement these systems in its sign-up process, the complaint alleges. Registered sexual offenders and repeated anonymous accounts created from the same IP addresses could have been blocked.
Uthmeier accuses Roblox of prioritizing user growth over child safety. According to the complaint, to sign up for a Roblox account in the United States, a user has to input only a username, password, and birthday without any verification or parental permission, allowing an underage child or adult to create an account of any age, which was especially concerning when a voice chat feature was introduced in 2021.
The whole sign-up process takes less than a minute.
The complaint states that the platform’s user numbers ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic, now up to nearly 83 million daily users: 20 percent under the age of 9, 20 percent between ages 9 and 12, 16 percent between 13 and 16, and 44 percent 17 or older.
As the Florida lawsuit moves forward, attorneys for the dozens of families involved in cases across the country petitioned for a multidistrict litigation. This would consolidate all Roblox-related federal lawsuits and future ones involving child-exploitation claims to a single federal judge.
At a hearing in Austin, Texas, this month, the request was granted. Dozens of existing lawsuits and any new cases filed will be combined into a single lawsuit in the Northern District of California, where the company is headquartered.
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