It’s never good—especially when you’re an online platform primarily known for catering to children—when Chris Hansen’s name starts coming up in articles about you. The former Dateline NBC correspondent is, after all, something of a single-issue investigator, having built his public brand—notably, the TruBlu true crime streaming service he founded in 2020—around sexual predators, and the To Catch-ing of same. And he’s now started focusing on Roblox, in the same week that the company has caught flack for banning public “vigilantes” doing similar work from its service, and become the subject of a lawsuit from Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill. In her suit against the online brand, launched Thursday, Murrill writes that Roblox is “the perfect place”—so far so good, you might be thinking, but that’s only because you lack our knowledge of how this sentence ends—”for pedophiles.” See?
If you’re not familiar with Roblox, it’s not so much a game as a game-making tool, where users, mostly quite young, can run around, hang out, and play various “free” games (on both phones, and computers) that pretty frequently try to get money out of them for various paid advantages. It’s been dinged pretty heavily for what’s perceived as lax moderation, a reputation that has created a subset of users—notably a YouTuber named Schlep—to publicly go after alleged pedophiles on the platform, often with moves taken straight from Hansen’s old playbook. (Schlep has highly viewed videos with names like “Roblox predator tries to run”—3.4 million views—or “We got a Roblox predator arrested”—1.9 million.) Earlier this week, Roblox banned a bunch of these “vigilante” users, saying in a statement that by pretending to be children, and encouraging their targets to meet up with them offline, the vigilantes were violating the service’s terms of service, and making its existing safety tools less effective. (In their press release about the bans, the company emphasizes its close relationship with law enforcement, including making more than 20,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2024.)
None of which has now stopped the company from either catching the attention of Hansen—who says he’s now working with Schlep on investigations into activity on the platform—or the Louisiana government. Murrill’s lawsuit against the company minces no words, asserting that Roblox “knowingly enabled and facilitated the systemic sexual exploitation and abuse of children across the United States, including Louisiana,” and that “Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety.” Per The Washington Post, the suit highlights some Roblox games that do, in fact, sound pretty bad, with names like “Escape to Epstein Island,” “Diddy Party” and “Public Bathroom Simulator Vibe.”
More than 85 million people play Roblox every day; the company itself claims that half of the kids under 16 in America use it at least once a month. This is not an academic issue, is the point; Roblox has built its entire reputation on being an online social space where kids are encouraged to congregate, and carries both heightened scrutiny, and responsibility, because of it. Murrill has called for the service to be shutdown outright, while other public officials are also taking notice: Federal House member Ro Khanna (D-California) has begun circulating a petition calling on the company to at least shore up its safety standards. “We’re not going to stand by while kids are exploited online, and powerful tech companies can do more to stop it” the petition states.
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