Understanding Roblox’s Grooming Problem

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0:35Hello, and welcome to the 4Forward Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 4Forward Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 4ForwardMedia.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. subscribers also get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at 444media.co. This week, we're joined by Cecilia D 'Anastasio. Cecilia reports about video games at Bloomberg and has written many important articles about the business and controversies of one of the biggest games in the world, Roblox.

1:21A few weeks ago, we had Patrick Klepek on to discuss Roblox from a parent's perspective. But today, we're going to hear about it from the perspective of a great investigative reporter. And for my money, the most knowledgeable journalist about Roblox. Cecilia, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Wow, such nice words. Thank you. Well earned. So I'm going to start with the same question I gave Patrick. Because I think unless you are deeply into Roblox, it's very hard to understand what it is. Cecilia, what is Roblox? So Roblox is not a video game. Imagine a mall of video games.

2:03And you go to the mall and you can walk into any of these stores and it's a completely different experience. There's Beast Swarm Simulator. There's a game in which you dress up and try and get the highest score from an audience. There's games about role-playing living in a city. there are games that are very popular to steal a brain rot, which I won't explain, but you should definitely look up if you have kids because your kid's probably playing it. But Roblox's great innovation is that it publishes games that are created by third parties, primarily children, and those games are popular with children.

2:41So instead of a 40 or 50-year-old in LA trying to guess what are children excited about, children know that and are making those games themselves. Is there anything comparable on the market? Let's take two other big games, Fortnite and Minecraft. Can you triangulate what Roblox is in comparison to those two things? Or is it an entirely different category of game in terms of what kids do in it? I would say it's a different category, but there's a lot in common with Fortnite and Minecraft. In common with Minecraft is this idea that you can build something yourself. So in addition to being a platform or like a mall where you can just play all of these different games, Roblox has something called Roblox Studio where you can make Roblox games yourself.

3:30And much like Minecraft, this is something that allows you to manifest, you know, any vision you have, all of your dreams, very like playground, like role-playing games into reality where it's accessible to millions of people online. The similarity with Fortnite is interesting too, because much like Fortnite, Roblox is very trend driven. So you see all these news headlines like Ariana Grande skin in Fortnite. I was playing Fortnite the other day and I was playing as Jinx from League of Legends, which is another game I love. Roblox creators will make games very quickly riding on trends in pop culture and gameplay mechanics.

4:05So it has these things in comment. But the reason why I'd say it's different is because Roblox is very social media-like. Roblox is social media for the Gen Z and Gen Alpha gamer base. You create this avatar and your avatar, which you're wearing on any given day, is not unlike the way people view their Instagram accounts or the way we might have viewed MySpace a long time ago. You meet friends, you express yourself, you communicate, you have all of these different online experiences together. You're fighting cops in Washington, D.C. You're a pirate. You're role playing being in a high school for fairies.

4:41And it's definitely going to, I think, trickle down to how social media tries to appeal to younger generations going forward. I was going to ask this later, but since you brought up the fact that you were playing Fortnite, we have played, I think, Warzone together. I know that you're into shooters. I know you really like video games. You play video games. do you play roblox and even if you don't play it do you get it on a like game critic level like do you understand the appeal is it fun for you to play that's a really good question one thing i will say an addendum to to your i think two complimentary introduction is that i'm not a great game critic so just take what i say with a grain of salt i just play a lot of games and i do play roblox so i can report on it the fun of roblox for um people who play it most often and you know it has something like 144 daily active users is the fact that your community is there i'm 34 we i started fact checking for you when i was 22 and i was still too old to play roblox at that time um although it's been around for for decades um my my people don't play roblox so for me recreationally, it doesn't have a strong pool.

6:00One thing that has been a big frustration for me is that as the AAA games industry is experiencing so many changes, layoffs, studio closures, game cancellations, the majority of growth in the games industry is coming from China and coming from Roblox. And that's not what's frustrating to me. What's frustrating to me is that I really wish people understood how powerful a platform it is and how powerful it is as a culture generator. and just logged on and gave it a spin. It's fun. I've had fun playing Grow a Garden. I've had fun playing Steal a Brain Rot. And I just think that to be a knowledgeable internet citizen today, you should just check it out.

6:39I think that's absolutely correct. And that's why I really wanted to have you on and I really wanted to have Patrick on because he experiences it because his kids are in there. I find it very challenging for two reasons. One is, I think the way that I came up as a reporter on video games is the same way that a lot of people did, which is something that I did as a kid. And then I grew up and I was like, can I make money from playing video games in some fashion? And I did, reviewing them and then reporting on them. And a lot of the best reporting came naturally from my interest. So it's like, I'm playing World of Warcraft, something interesting is happening in World of Warcraft.

7:21I'm writing a story about it. And I think I get Fortnite. I can play Fortnite and understand the appeal. It's not something that I play regularly, but it's very much within the tradition of video games that I understand. And Roblox is really where I am completely boomerfied and I don't understand what is happening, which is why I need to talk to other people. And then the other thing is that when you're reporting on stuff, you get this feedback from publishing articles. You see what people are interested in And I found actually, at least back in Vice when we were doing more of this, that the Roblox community is entirely self-sufficient in terms of getting the news they want about Roblox.

8:04They get it from Roblox YouTube channels and Roblox influencers. And it's like, they're not coming to Motherboard at the time for Roblox news. They're going to their own people. So it's like, we were writing it for a different audience that wasn't interested in it. And I don't know. That's just one reason that I kind of fell off. But it is gigantic. I think you said it's a... What is it? 144 million daily, monthly active users? Not to advertise the Bloomberg terminal, but I have all of these stats in front of me if you want me to read them out. Oh, please, please. We have 144 million daily active users.

8:44And each of those on average is spending$15 per quarter. and it's making 1.4 billion. It made 1.4 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025. So it is a giant, giant, giant, giant platform. It's a beast. The thing that always rocked my world is something that people love to track in like, I don't know, the traditional Game Express, the Enthusiast Press, whatever you want to call it, is like Steam Charts. Like what is the number one game on Steam? And there's been a couple of times where the most popular game on Roblox, a Roblox game that some kid made is more popular than any game on Steam.

9:23And then you're like, whoa, what is happening? The industry is changing. Yeah, I'm looking at what are the top ones right now. There's this platform called Roe Monitor. There's one called Fish It, which is a fishing game. Steal a Brain Rot. Escape Tsunami for Brain Rots. Adopt Me, which is a pet adoption game. That one's a big one. That's an established one. Right, yeah. Another thing I wanted to ask, Ashley, is like, do you think there is like cultural staying power? Like we just went over some numbers, revenue, numbers of users, obviously like gamer culture, such as it is, has infiltrated the rest of the culture.

10:02Do you think Roblox has that as well? Definitely. I have seen Reddit posts from upset parents because their children would get in fights on the playground over another kid doing like stealing their brain rot on roblox there was news that a film production company was going to make a film for grow a garden i think that's pretty interesting when mainstream media creation processes get involved in roblox because like everything happening on the internet today trend cycles move so quickly i'm curious to see whether the development cycle for a movie will mesh with how popular you know a roblox game will continue to be but yeah there's there's definitely staying power it's just not stuff that we might necessarily be exposed to considering how fragmented media channels have become yeah i'm trying to think what is like the singular most popular piece of roblox culture it's like the oof sound is that is that what it is i'm trying to can you think of something better than that's a good one the oof sound yeah yeah definitely i hear in my head a lot of the times when I fuck up or something like that.

11:17Now that we've established a huge thing, millions of players, let's talk about some of the problems that have come up many times, sometimes in your reporting. In 2024, you published a story that covers all of these issues. You focus on one example. It is a game called Sonic eclipse online it was made with this by this person who goes by doc and can you tell me what is sonic eclipse online and uh not not to spoil it but how did this doc person come to be wanted by the fbi sure i'm happy to explain so i reported the story with an incredible journalist Olivia Carville. And what we did was we dove deep into a case we saw from documents we had requested from law enforcement.

12:17And that case described Dr. Rafatnik. Imagine this Roblox avatar. He has this tall white hat, this very Colonel Sanders-esque beard, this white suit. And he has this game, Sonic Eclipse Online. And if you know anything about the Sonic fandom, which I know you do, because you've been writing on the internet for a very long time. And it was quite popular. And people wanted to play Sonic, play Sonic characters, but not spend the money on a Sonic game for PlayStation. They could play it for free on Roblox. And because so many people wanted to do that, Dr. Rafotnik became very popular. And he developed this game very much in public on a Discord server where lots of people could join who are fans of the game on Roblox and come directly into contact with him.

13:04And Dr. Rafatnik said he was Jaden Shlodesky, who is allegedly the brother of one of the Roblox founders or something like that. No one knew what he looked like, but sometimes he would post pictures of himself with cartoon pictures of himself with blonde hair and blue eyes looking really buff. And he cultivated this cult of personality in the server where he would make these very edgy jokes. And part of what he did with that cult of personality was groom minors. He met through the Roblox platform. And one of those minors was 15 years old. So how did this doc person end up in a police report? He ended up in a police report because he had groomed this 15-year-old over the internet.

13:50He had paid her for drawings she had made. He had told her that he was someone who really understood her. and over time eventually convinced her to leave from her home in the Midwest and go and see him in New Jersey. And he was not the brother of this Roblox developer. He was this guy named Arnold Castillo. He was 22. He was not blonde with blue eyes and buff. He was very pale. He was dumpy. and he basically paid an Uber$1 ,000 to bring her to him. And when police found this girl in the house, she was sleeping on the floor. She had been abused. It was disgusting and it was horrible. Yeah. I highly recommend people read the whole tale.

14:41The title of the article is Roblox's Pedophile Problem. Really great reporting. I think the, I don't want to trivialize it, but the novelty or the thing that is hard to look away from for me from this story is just the virtual aspect of it. It's like, there's this character in the game with a white hat. He has power over this virtual domain and he's talking to all these people and eventually it ends up in this terrible situation. But we didn't always use the words grooming, but we've always had issues with adults preying on minors for as long as we've been using the internet. I am wondering if there's anything about the dynamics of Roblox as a platform that makes that different.

15:34Not better or worse, but is the fact that there is an economy, is the fact that people have avatars, is the fact that people can be masters of these domains? Do you think that changes the dynamics for these situations at all? I love this question. I think it's really important to ask, you know, what is it about this specific platform that has created the conditions for this to happen? Because as you point out correctly, children have been groomed over the internet for as long as the internet has existed. Children have been groomed over video games for as long as video games have existed. What is it particularly about Roblox that has created all this controversy?

16:14One thing I will say is that Roblox officials have come out and said, like, this isn't just a Roblox problem. This is also a problem with Discord, with Snapchat, with Instagram. People might meet on our platform, but then they move those conversations elsewhere, right? And this creates an interesting data problem for us as journalists because what gets reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is going to be that end point, right? Where is the last point of abuse before something is caught? And that's not Roblox. Roblox, from experts I talked to, is pretty upstream. So what we did for this report was we looked for commonalities in cases that were sent to the police that mentioned Roblox.

16:57We found that police had arrested at least two dozen people who were accused of abducting or abusing victims they had met on the platform. And when we went through these documents over and over and over again, what we found were a couple of things. One was that Robux, the platform's currency, is hugely enticing to children. Children view Robux as dollars. They view the clothes their avatar wears as their real clothes. And these status symbols are incredibly important. The second thing we found is that predators have learned this about Roblox. They know that most of the people on the platform are minors.

17:34And I found some messages on Darknet fora where predators were specifically saying that they would go into Roblox and look for young people to groom. The third thing I would say about Roblox specifically is that we spoke with people who have worked at Roblox about their moderation norms. And there was a lot of advocacy around more stringent guardrails around who communicates with whom on the platform. What I will say is that since our article came out and since there's been a lot of scrutiny, Roblox has done a lot to be safer for young people. But I would say this is what makes Roblox potentially different from other platforms.

18:16Yeah, the next thing I wanted to mention is you talked to, I think it was 20 people at the company, either current or former, which is really an impressive feat of reporting. What would you say is your takeaway from how they feel about this problem? What would you say is the main lesson you got from talking to 20 people at the company? First of all, this article is pretty bold at this point. It was published in 2024, and a lot has changed since 2024. So although, of course, we stand by our reporting and what people said at the time was their true experience, a lot has changed at Roblox. Like, Roblox has done so much.

19:00Dozens of updates a year to prevent predators from coming in contact with children. But at the time, when we talked to people, what they said was that they had... People had said that they had attempted many times to make moderation more stringent, but they felt that their concerns weren't being listened to by higher-ups at the company. Of course, in these investor calls that we listen to every quarter, moderation always comes up. And the chief executive officer and co-founder of the company, Dave Buzuki, always addresses it. So it's definitely top of mind for Roblox. Do you know what that moderation looks like?

19:36Yes. Moderating Roblox is very difficult. You're not just moderating every item that is posted onto Roblox's marketplace. You're not just moderating every asset that goes into every game or every avatar body to make sure that none of them have like genitalia or anything inappropriate exposed. But you have to also, in some instances, moderate the way people are engaging with each other. Can you imagine how challenging that is? At the time we were reporting the story, there were very public posts from content creators around Roblox about Bathroom Simulator, a very popular game where people would pretend to be in the bathroom.

20:13And you can imagine children playing this game, lots of inappropriate dynamics emerged. But at the base of that game, it's a bathroom. Everyone goes to the bathroom, right? This is what makes it very challenging to moderate the platform. Recently, Roblox has been saying that they are investing more in AI moderation. I've been very interested in this because I did a story last year interviewing career moderators who are concerned that they are being replaced by AI, which is something that a lot of big tech companies have been doing. And many of them said that AI at that time was not yet equipped to actually ascertain the subtleties of child grooming specifically in some of these other very, very dangerous types of interactions that can occur online.

20:59And I don't have anything to say about Roblox's AI moderation specifically. I have not interviewed people about Roblox's AI moderation specifically, but broadly speaking, that's been a trend in the tech industry. And I'm curious to see how Roblox grapples with that. Yeah, for sure. We're definitely seeing more AI moderation wherever we look. I think Roblox is a very challenging platform to moderate. We cover this thing a lot. And usually it's text, images, sound. And here you have this very rich extra element of people interacting with each other in a 3D space and be able to make innuendo and double meaning and a nightmare frankly um definitely sympathize with with the challenge regardless of of how they're handling it at the moment something that patrick has brought up and i saw in your stories as well which i'm hoping you can clarify a little bit there is some controversy about parental controls and what is set by default you know you know what i'm referring to?

22:06I do. Yeah. It's about the sensitive games or the quote unquote sensitive games where sensitive means like issues like marriage equality and pay equity in sports. Right. Yeah. So how does that work? Can you talk about that? Yeah, there was an advocacy group that criticized. There are a couple of advocacy groups that criticized Roblox for identifying certain games as sensitive because they dealt with these issues that the advocacy groups considered were very important to the development of young people's social awareness. I think it's really interesting that that was occurring alongside a lot of bands of the game in the Middle East, where, you know, there are a half dozen countries in the Middle East that have removed access to Roblox.

22:49And while many of those countries have specifically said that child safety was a major factor in that decision, there were also expressed concerns around kids having access to LGBTQ content. So I don't have anything concrete sort of linking these things together. I just think that it's a really interesting kind of regulatory atmosphere that Roblox is working to navigate.

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