Roblox was alerted to recreations of infamous school shootings being held in its game. This was brought to the company's attention by Anti-Defamation League director Daniel Kelley who stated that this is something he runs into often and far too easily.
He stressed that the platform, despite its push to appeal to older players, is home to "very young children" and so the ease of finding such content is all the more alarming. However, speaking to Verge, Roblox claimed to have removed these experiences while highlighting that it is working on improving the moderation.
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"We promptly removed this experience from Roblox after it was brought to our attention and suspended the user responsible or violating our Community Rules," the company stated. "We do not tolerate racism, discriminatory speech, or content related to tragic events. We have a stringent safety and monitoring system that is continuously active and we rigorously and proactively enforce.
"In this case, our proactive detection includes human review to balance allowing references to the geographic location – New Zealand's largest city – but not uses that violate our policies."
The example shared by Daniel kelley is a recreation of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting that occurred in New Zealand during Friday Prayer. 51 were killed and 40 were injured. The attacker is currently undergoing a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
"They do [have a content review policy]!" Kelley added. "In fact, its set of policies are one of the most robust in games, but games overall are less sophisticated in their content moderation efforts about extremism and hate in general
"I have flagged like four different versions of this for them in the last year and they always take it down when I tell them but there's always another one later on."
It's a problem that community-based games have long dealt with. Back in 2010, I ran into an "Auschwitz RP" server on Garry's Mod where the moderators put on faux, offensive German accents and played the role of concentration camp guards. One look at the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop and server browser and you'll find this is still, a decade on, being sustained.
Roblox, however, has stressed that it wants to prevent and tackle these kinds of servers. Whether it is effective in doing so remains to be seen.
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