It started with a game. The 15-year-old, whom we’ll call Sarah, must have been flattered when a celebrity from one of her favourite online games singled her out. Jacob Shedletsky, well known as a developer on Roblox, an online video game popular with young people, took an interest after meeting the American teenager inside the virtual world, buying the artwork that she created and sending expensive art tools (and the occasional meal) to her home address.
The pair struck up what she would see as a benign friendship, and their communication drifted off the moderated gaming platform towards more private channels. As time passed, Shedletsky persuaded Sarah into believing they were in love.
And then she went missing.
Jacob Shedletsky was a pseudonym – a supposed brother of (and unbeknownst to) the entirely unrelated John Shedletsky, a former creative director at Roblox. Sarah had been in communication with a 22-year-old in New Jersey named Arnold Castillo, who, over the course of five months, groomed the child via Instagram, the Discord messaging site and Roblox.
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Castillo led Sarah to believe he could connect her to employment opportunities in the online gaming industry, using this as leverage to engage in sexually explicit conversations. After paying an Uber driver $1,000 to collect the girl from her family home and bring her more than 1,000km to his residence, Castillo then sexually abused her over eight days.
Through details released by a US attorney’s office in Indiana, where Sarah lived, and subsequent investigative reporting by Bloomberg, we now know what can sometimes happen when the guardrails fail to protect children on Roblox.
The second-most-popular video game globally, which Bloomberg describes as the world’s biggest recreation zone for kids, Roblox is mostly harmless fun. Its users, more than 40 per cent of whom are under 12, can create virtual worlds using basic programming, design silly mini games to play in those virtual worlds, and engage in the kind of free play one might ordinarily associate with preteens ambling around the neighbourhood. It’s free, anonymised – to protect children’s data – and from the outset appears far more appealing than the shoot-’em-ups embraced by previous generations of gamers. (It was designed in the 2000s primarily to be a platform for education.)
Roblox users can generate a real-world income for themselves by monetising their creations. There’s even a version of Ireland within the platform, with its own government, gardaí and loosely organised ecosystem. An X account representing the Roblox government of Ireland recently shared images of the inauguration of LynetteNíCatháin, the virtual country’s new president. “The ceremony began with words offered by the taoiseach honouring the new head of state,” the post read, “followed by a prayer read by a representative of the Holy See.”
Children have always dressed up as adults to play doctors, police officers and astronauts. These virtual versions just feel a little closer to making us the humans in the Disney film Wall-E.
Roblox expanded its user base significantly during the pandemic. In 2019 it had fewer than 18 million daily users. As children retreated to their homes with their families, the platform rocketed in popularity. Today it has almost 80 million users, and the company that owns it, Roblox Corporation, is worth about $28.5 billion.
The company does not release user statistics by country, but an Irish online safety survey in 2021 found that Roblox and Minecraft (another open-world sandbox game) were particularly popular among nine- to 11-year-olds in Ireland. Roblox data suggests that users spend an average of 200 hours a year on the platform.
The game has a pervasive cultural impact. A few years ago Kanye West went viral (662 million views on YouTube) with a music video that saw him dress up in a blocky Roblox-inspired costume. Gucci launched its own virtual Gucci World within Roblox – ostensibly an exercise in brand recognition – and landed Miley Cyrus to front the campaign. And brands have established entire stores within Roblox, fronted by full-time staff paid in real-world wages. Last month Ikea hired two Irish users, one from Co Dublin, the other from Co Kerry, to work at its virtual store. They beat 18,000 other Irish applicants – and 160,000 more from around the world. They’re paid €14.80 an hour, in line with Ikea Ireland’s living wage, and help gamers when browsing for furnishings for their digital homes.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has invested more than $46 billion since 2021 in its competitor platform, the Metaverse, which has yet to pay off. This has rattled investors, but the company’s perseverance suggests the industry is betting on these digital playgrounds. Estée Lauder launched a virtual serum that Metaverse users can apply to avatars for a “glowing, radiant look”. And Byredo partnered with Nike to create digital perfumes. It’s all a bit dystopian – and has a whiff of the recent NFT hype that dissipated so quickly. But these virtual worlds’ captive audiences of highly impressionable young users are growing.
That a company such as Roblox, which is so vocal about its child-protection procedures, could in effect facilitate Castillo’s manipulative behaviour shocked the industry – although less so company insiders, who have claimed that their concerns have been sidelined in pursuit of an absurd goal of a billion daily Roblox users. For its reporting, Bloomberg interviewed more than 20 current and former employees about the platform’s child-safety policies and heard repeated concerns that the company is inundated with troubling reports. The platform employs about 3,000 content moderators, but staff say it’s not enough. Speaking anonymously, they have told reporters that they believe the company was prioritising its expansion over child safety.
Although Roblox’s anonymity policy protects children who use the platform, it also protects predators. You can set up an account in less than a minute and need give no identifiable personal data. The platform’s default settings allow children to chat openly with strangers; it’s up to parents to enable Roblox’s safety features. When Arnold Castillo was arrested, Roblox said it did not know who he was and had no record of any payments to an individual registered under that name.
Since 2018, police in the United States have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they met or groomed using Roblox, according to Bloomberg. And most of the explicit interactions occur on other platforms, away from the watchful eyes of moderators, where children can sometimes be asked to send naked imagery in return for in-game currency. Bloomberg’s analysis shows that as Roblox’s user numbers have increased, so too have reports of suspected child exploitation, which reached more than 13,000 last year.
Here, the Garda says that it does not record any specific incident type for grooming, as it is not considered a statutory offence, and that alleged offences could be recorded under a number of categories. It does, however, provide extensive safety advice for parents about online child exploitation; it also recommends Pegi, an organisation dedicated to online-safety education, as a source of more information.
Roblox has been banned in a small number of countries, including Jordan, Guatemala and, temporarily, the United Arab Emirates, often because of child-protection concerns. The latest to join this list is Turkey, which had millions of users before it was shut down there, according to the company. Some children took to the streets in protest, such was their frustration.
The country’s minister for justice said on X this month that it was obliged to ensure children were protected and that attempts to destroy Turkey’s social structure and abuse children would never be allowed. In response, Roblox said it was “committed to doing everything we can to keep our community safe”, would “work tirelessly to be vigilant against attempts to circumvent our safety systems” and was already “one of the safest online platforms for our users”.
Roblox, which within the European Union is regulated by the Netherlands’ digital-services co-ordinator, tells The Irish Times that it uses strict chat filters to block inappropriate phrases and prevent sharing of personal information, adding that, as well as allowing parental oversight, it is one of the only technology platforms with a dedicated civility initiative, “to empower people to navigate the online world with civility and confidence”.
On the day Bloomberg’s article appeared, Roblox published a statement from its chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, highlighting the company’s efforts to ensure it is “one of the safest online environments for our users”. He stressed that of the 205 billion pieces of content generated on the platform last year, only 0.0063 per cent of them were flagged as violating its policies. (That 0.0063 per cent amounts to just under 13 million pieces of flagged content.) Kaufman also highlighted the company’s work with law enforcement to track down suspected perpetrators, its high standards for child safety and the fact that “safety issues are not widespread or systemic on Roblox”.
We failed to protect our young people when we unwittingly exposed them to social media, the detrimental mental-health effects of which have become apparent only down the line: the Mater hospital in Dublin has seen a five-fold increase in self-harm referrals over the past three decades, with social-media use increasingly contributing to a range of mental-health problems, particularly among young people. As the next generation becomes engaged in a new virtual playground, we must not fail them too.
Roblox’s chief executive was not among the social-media bosses hauled in front of the United States Congress this year to defend the company’s child-protection records. Roblox is social media by stealth – masked as a video game for kids – and it should be regulated as such.
We have had a glimpse of what laissez-faire regulation of virtual worlds can sometimes lead to. The vast majority of children will never encounter horrendous abusers like Castillo – who has been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for his crimes – but for us to assume it’s okay to leave profit-motivated companies to establish their own guardrails is to indulge in true fantasy.
