The Unsafe Playground That Prints Money
Roblox tells parents it is safe. The company’s website markets a digital playground where kids can create, trade, and socialize. Its most popular summer game involved nothing more sinister than planting gardens.
Yet in the same period, the company self-reported nearly as many child exploitation cases in six months as it did in the whole of last year.
Families are filing lawsuits by the hundreds. Safety measures arrive with fanfare, but predators find ways around them in days. The contradiction is not hidden.
This is not an accident unique to Roblox. It is the logic of platforms.
First build scale, then improvise safeguards.
Facebook only discovered disinformation after the 2016 election. YouTube only worried about radicalization once journalists exposed it. TikTok only embraced child safety once governments began investigating.
The drift is always the same.
Platforms treat harm as an externality, something to be managed in PR statements rather than designed against from the start.
We begin to accept that convenience, profit, and scale are higher priorities than decency. The market for children’s attention is treated no differently than the market for oil.
Roblox’s model explains the problem better than its spokespeople do.
It makes money by selling Robux, an in-game currency kids use to buy outfits, upgrades, and access. The more time they spend inside the system, the more they spend. That means Roblox must maximize frictionless play and minimize restrictions.
Kids are encouraged to chat freely, join strangers’ games, and keep returning every day. What looks like freedom for creativity is also freedom for predators.
Moderation cannot keep up with this design.
Automated filters can be tricked by coded language. Human moderators are drowning in reports. Trusted Connections, Roblox’s new safeguard, relies on teenagers verifying their age through AI scans that can be faked with screenshots from video games.
It is all optics. Roblox needs parents to believe it is safe enough to let kids play, while ensuring that restrictions never slow down growth.
The legal system is now catching up.
Law firms across the United States say they are preparing hundreds of cases alleging Roblox facilitated exploitation. The company’s likely defense will not be that the problem does not exist, but that it took “reasonable measures.” In other words, safety as a performance layer. The burden shifts to families. If their child followed a stranger to Discord or Snapchat, Roblox can say the fault lies elsewhere.
The mispricing is obvious.
Investors have priced Roblox as a children’s entertainment giant while discounting the liability risk of becoming a predator’s hunting ground. The lawsuits are economic costs waiting to be recognized, not moral failures.
Roblox cannot be both things at once.
It cannot be a wide-open creative playground for millions of children and a tightly secured platform that prevents exploitation. Each move toward safety introduces friction that threatens engagement. Each move toward freedom enlarges the risk surface for predators.
The contradiction is structural, not incidental.
The company’s strategy is to delay recognition of this fact for as long as possible, because the business depends on scale today and accountability tomorrow.
This is a shift in what society tolerates.
If Roblox was an IRL playground where thousands of children were preyed upon, it would have been shut down immediately. But because it is digital and removed, it is treated as a billion-dollar growth company with “safety challenges.”
The Roblox story shows how platforms turn safety into theater. The real priority is growth. The costs are pushed downward to children and parents, while profits are captured at the top. The compass here is simple. When a company insists that safety is its “top priority,” ask instead what it optimizes for. If the answer is engagement and revenue, then safety is a feature for marketing copy, not for reality.