Digital Safety Expert Urges Lawmakers to Protect Children on Roblox

An expert with digital safety platform Bark Technologies has called on lawmakers to act to protect children from predators on the gaming platform Roblox.

"Children are dying every single day. They are being harmed every day that we wait. We cannot wait any longer," Titania Jordan, an author and chief marketing officer at Bark Technologies, told The Hill's "Raising America."

"You (lawmakers) are not on the right side of history of working to protect children online, I don't think you have a soul.

"Yes, privacy is important. Yes, freedom of speech is important. But there's a reason why we have R-rated movies, right?"

"There's a reason why children can't buy alcohol or drive or buy cigarettes or walk into a pornography store to buy adult material, like we have some safeguards in place for children in the real world, and we don't have the appropriate amount of them for them in the digital world," she added.

Roblox, which is used by more than 85 million people each day, has been sued for allegedly exposing children to sexual predators by at least four states and two Southern California families.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced a suit Thursday alleging the company deceived parents about the safety of its platform while failing to protect children from accessing graphic adult content and being contacted and groomed by predators.

"Roblox is hiding behind press releases and superficial safety measures while predators are openly grooming and targeting children on its platform," he said in a post on X.

"As our criminal investigation continues, we filed a lawsuit to hold Roblox accountable for misrepresenting the platform's safety."

Roblox in a statement said the lawsuits "fundamentally misrepresent how Roblox works. Roblox is built with safety at its core.

"We have advanced safeguards that monitor our platform for harmful content and communications. Users cannot send or receive images through chat, eliminating one of the biggest opportunities for misuse seen elsewhere online," it said in a statement, per the Hill. "We are also implementing additional measures to limit further who users can chat with.

"We take swift action against anyone found to violate our safety rules and work closely with law enforcement to support investigations and hold bad actors accountable."