Roblox, an online gaming platform, is confronted with a lawsuit alleging it enabled a California girl''s exploitation, and its chief scientist said finding dangerous content in the company''s virtual world is nothing like seeing it in video.
"It''s such a challenge to moderate 3D," Morgan McGuire said during a press conference in Austin on Tuesday. He had no information on the recent lawsuit, but said Roblox was a product that has both safety and civility at the forefront.
Roblox, based in San Mateo, Calif., is developing bots to patrol user-generated games and press buttons to detect dangerous content.
"This is rather putting down speakeasies," he said, referring to US prohibition-era restrictions that are illegally concealed from law enforcement.
This year, the BBC reported that users had created explicit private spaces, known as "condos," in which users could interact with virtual sex.
McKinsey believes the company is able to remove unnecessary content within minutes thanks to artificial intelligence software and moderators. What escapes scrutiny is not "horrificific bad," but it is likely to be a terms violation.
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Still, a lawsuit filed last week alleges that adult men on Roblox connected with a girl, who was born in 2009, and nabbed her to join Discord, Snap Inc''s Snapchat, and Meta Platforms Inc''s Instagram to chat with them. The lawsuit alleges they pushed her to drink, abuse prescription medications, and post explicit images, leading to suicide attempts.
Roblox prohibits users from posting phone numbers or off-platform links, according to McGuire. However, as the effort grows to connect disparate worlds into an alternate digital reality called the metaverse, Roblox is engaging with a consortium of companies about how they might collaborate in the face of different limitations.
"When we start looking at the open metaverse concept, we want to be able to keep what we have created, rather than simply allow anything to enter our platform."
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