Report on Roblox describes it as ‘a pedophile hell for children’

Shares of Roblox fell as much as nine percent after the release of a report claiming the software is a “pedophile hellhole,” alongside figures suggesting the company is vastly exaggerating the number of people using it.

For those paying close attention, Roblox, a gaming platform-cum-creation tool, seemed like a place you might want to keep your kids away from for years. However, for most parents, it is routinely assumed that it is a safe online playground. The hugely successful portal for wildly popular user-created games has been repeatedly accused of doing far too little to protect its young users from exploitation and sexual predators. This is now underlined by a report from short selling research firm Hindenburg Research.

As reported by Fortune, Hindenburg Research has uploaded its latest research under the title: “Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids.”

User inflation

The accusations contained within are, as the title suggests, incredibly inflammatory. This starts with suggestions that Roblox Corp’s stock prices are being inflated via “growth numbers it presents to Wall Street” that do not represent reality. The company, which has posted losses every quarter since going public in 2021, is accused of “lying to investors, regulators and advertisers about the number of ‘people’ on its platform, inflating the key metric by more than 25-42% .” It then adds, “We also show how engagement hours, another key metric, are estimated to be inflated by more than 100%.”

These alleged numbers are based on comparing the numbers Roblox publicly states with the numbers of former employees who claim that the internal numbers are clearly different and are responsible for multiple accounts and bots. The report goes so far as to describe this as “two sets of user counting books: one for internal business decisions… and one used by the finance team that reports higher numbers to investors.”

Accusations of grossly inflated player numbers go much further. Hindenburg says his research has shown that Roblox’s second most popular game, Blox Fruits, is “dominated by traffic from Vietnam,” where extremely popular Facebook groups used advertising methods to open more than 20 Roblox tabs at once, something where players may be encouraged. do so because they can sell the fruits of their labor for in-game currency.

Hindenburg says it hired a technical consultant who “monitored the top ~7,200 Roblox games on ~2.1 million Roblox servers and collected 297.7 million rows of real-time player data.” From this extensive data, the researching short seller concludes that instead of the average user playing 2.4 hours per day, as Roblox’s data indicates, it was actually closer to 22 minutes. The report suggests this is partly due to bots, and partly thanks to the claim that Roblox “incentivizes developers to create ‘AFK’ games that artificially increase engagement.”

‘Pedophile hellscape’

Following investigations from Wired and the excellent People Make Games in 2021, Hindenburg saves his most provocative language for the topic of child protection. It uses the words: “our in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hell, with children exposed to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely offensive language.”

The report specifically references a 2024 report from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation entitled, “Roblox Treats Child Protection Like a Game.”

At this point the report’s evidence becomes more anecdotal than analytical, but it still contains damning evidence that points to a widespread lack of care when it comes to protecting children. Multiple accounts registered under variations of the name “Jeffrey Epstein” had usernames like “@igruum_minors” and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE.” The most shocking element reported reads:

After finding a username, we listed our age as ‘under 13’ to see if children are exposed to adult content. By simply entering “adult” into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members who openly trafficked in child pornography and solicited sex acts from minors.

We tracked some members of ‘Adult Studios’ and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography.

The “Adult Studios” group has been locked since the report was published.

The report goes on to detail games available in Roblox that seem like they could be easily spotted and blocked, with names like Escape to Epstein Island and Run From Diddy Simulator. Hindenburg also found games with a million visits, such as Beat Up Homeless Outside 7/11 Simulator and Beat Up The Pregnant, the latter described as one in which “users hacked pregnant women to death in a Wal-Mart parking lot with machetes or killed them with frying pans or a selection of guns.

Furthermore,

Our therapist posed as a child in the Roblox “therapy” experience, introducing himself as a “rapper with just one p.” We were advised to run away from home and that he would come pick us up so we could move into his basement in exchange for paying rent with our bodies.

The recurring theme in the report is that when registering accounts as children aged 8 or 9, there were no restrictions for adult-themed groups, or even for groups that had been repeatedly moderated for ‘dealing with underage pornography’.

Roblox response

Roblox Corporation responded to Hindenburg’s report last night. The company calls its response “Roblox Refutes Misleading Claims in the Hindenburg Report” (PDF) and starts with wildly irrelevant statements like: “Every day, tens of millions of users of all ages have safe and positive experiences on Roblox, adhering to the the company’s community standards.”

This is undoubtedly true, but it does not refute any of Hindenburg’s claims. It’s a bit like a car manufacturer responding to reports that one of its cars keeps exploding by saying, “Millions of customers don’t explode every day.” It then reiterates the company’s commitment to “proactive and preventative safety measures,” which you could argue are nothing to brag about, given the thousands of words of detailed evidence on how they don’t work.

The response then goes on to claim that Hindenburg’s financial claims are “misleading.” It points out that as short sellers, Hindenburg has a financial incentive here, and goes on to talk about “cash bookings” and “cash flow,” which the report says are left out because “the facts simply don’t support their agenda.” ”

There is then a section that refutes claims that Roblox reports misleading user numbers to investors, by quoting a section from their own accounts that openly explains how user numbers are calculated, explicitly stating: “our DUAs (Daily Active Users) are not measure of unique individuals who have access to Roblox.” One might suggest that ‘Daily Active Users’ is not a brilliant term to use in this light, but more importantly it fails to recognize that the specific claim of Hindenburg’s report was that the company uses different internal metrics for its own business decisions. than the one it shares publicly. The answer doesn’t mention this at all.

It is a very peculiar response given the seriousness of Hindenburg Research’s claims, especially in relation to the serious shortcomings encountered when it comes to child protection. Simply saying that Roblox has “invested heavily in its trust and security efforts,” without mentioning that there may still be room for improvement, or any expression of regret about the serious flaws Hindenburg says he discovered suggests for me ambivalence at best.

Roblox Corporation is the company whose studio head Stefano Corazza said earlier this year that the terrible fees paid to young users who create the games in Roblox are “a gift” to “15-year-olds in Indonesia who live in a slum living”. .”

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