The community-driven game platform Roblox, which has a large audience of young children, is seemingly struggling to contain incidents of mass shooting recreations arising on its platform.
As reported by The Verge, recreations of New Zealand's Christchurch mass shooting have been spotted on a number of occasions by Anti-Defamation League researcher Daniel Kelley. Kelley, who recently tweeted about the incidents, said that he was able to find two separate recreations of the tragedy within a "brisk 10 minute keyword search."
Since January 2020, Kelley has reportedly found three separate instances where Roblox experiences have been created depicting the Christchurch shootings. "I would like one time to search for 'Christchurch' on Roblox," Kelley tweeted after finding a recent experience, "and not find a new recreation of the 2019 mosque shooting on a game platform aimed at very young children." he finished. Two of the experiences found by Kelley had reportedly been visited over two hundred times each on the platform.
Speaking to The Verge, Roblox said that it proactively monitors the platform for terrorist content and in particular that it is "aggressively monitoring" recreations of mass shootings. Despite this, the company also noted that references to the Christchurch shooting, in particular, are difficult to filter using automatic text references as these would likely also block legitimate and fair references to the city with the same name. Roblox says that its "proactive detection" includes human review but that seemingly didn't stop a number of experiences that infringe upon the platform's Community Rules from slipping through.
Roblox confirmed that it has since removed the aforementioned experiences from its platform. A company representative said, "We promptly removed this experience from Roblox after it was brought to our attention and suspended the user responsible for violating our Community Rules." The statement went on to reiterate that Roblox does not tolerate "racism, discriminatory speech, or content related to tragic events."
Earlier this year, Roblox went public via a direct listing which impressed investors enough to earn it a first-day valuation of $45 billion. The company's valuation puts it ahead of many other leading companies in the industry. Whilst content depicting mass shootings and other terrorist-related ideals would potentially damage Roblox's business valuation, Kelley said that the real harm found in these experiences comes through the ideologies that they normalize.
“Each game on Roblox is a potentially a social platform in and of itself, and can potentially give refuge to players of all ages who are flirting with or fully engaged with hateful ideologies online,” Kelley told The Verge. “Every space that allows for the veneration of hateful ideologies [...] contributes to the normalization of these ideologies and their spread.”
Whilst the company continues to monitor its platform for content that infringes its Community Rules, Roblox has also recently been at the centre of a $200 million lawsuit that sees it on the receiving end of a claim that the platform has been allowing unlicensed song use by its users. The National Music Publishers' Association CEO David Israelite announced the lawsuit against Roblox in June.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
Continue reading...
As reported by The Verge, recreations of New Zealand's Christchurch mass shooting have been spotted on a number of occasions by Anti-Defamation League researcher Daniel Kelley. Kelley, who recently tweeted about the incidents, said that he was able to find two separate recreations of the tragedy within a "brisk 10 minute keyword search."
Since January 2020, Kelley has reportedly found three separate instances where Roblox experiences have been created depicting the Christchurch shootings. "I would like one time to search for 'Christchurch' on Roblox," Kelley tweeted after finding a recent experience, "and not find a new recreation of the 2019 mosque shooting on a game platform aimed at very young children." he finished. Two of the experiences found by Kelley had reportedly been visited over two hundred times each on the platform.
Speaking to The Verge, Roblox said that it proactively monitors the platform for terrorist content and in particular that it is "aggressively monitoring" recreations of mass shootings. Despite this, the company also noted that references to the Christchurch shooting, in particular, are difficult to filter using automatic text references as these would likely also block legitimate and fair references to the city with the same name. Roblox says that its "proactive detection" includes human review but that seemingly didn't stop a number of experiences that infringe upon the platform's Community Rules from slipping through.
Roblox confirmed that it has since removed the aforementioned experiences from its platform. A company representative said, "We promptly removed this experience from Roblox after it was brought to our attention and suspended the user responsible for violating our Community Rules." The statement went on to reiterate that Roblox does not tolerate "racism, discriminatory speech, or content related to tragic events."
Earlier this year, Roblox went public via a direct listing which impressed investors enough to earn it a first-day valuation of $45 billion. The company's valuation puts it ahead of many other leading companies in the industry. Whilst content depicting mass shootings and other terrorist-related ideals would potentially damage Roblox's business valuation, Kelley said that the real harm found in these experiences comes through the ideologies that they normalize.
“Each game on Roblox is a potentially a social platform in and of itself, and can potentially give refuge to players of all ages who are flirting with or fully engaged with hateful ideologies online,” Kelley told The Verge. “Every space that allows for the veneration of hateful ideologies [...] contributes to the normalization of these ideologies and their spread.”
Whilst the company continues to monitor its platform for content that infringes its Community Rules, Roblox has also recently been at the centre of a $200 million lawsuit that sees it on the receiving end of a claim that the platform has been allowing unlicensed song use by its users. The National Music Publishers' Association CEO David Israelite announced the lawsuit against Roblox in June.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
Continue reading...