Roblox, one of the world

Editor’s note: This article contains descriptions and an image of hate speech found on the Roblox servers and might be triggering to some readers.

In Roblox, one of the world’s largest online gaming platforms, users join to play, create, and be themselves in a virtual world — but some might be there for a more insidious purpose: to expose youth to hate speech.

Players of “Spray Paint!” — a popular game on Roblox, with over a billion visits, in which players skate and create graffiti art in a virtual skatepark setting — can bypass moderation by spray painting hate messages across walls, ramps and other virtual game settings, a CBS News investigation found.

CBS News documented dozens of swastikas and at least a dozen instances of hate speech targeting minority groups across Spray Paint! servers, which host multiplayer games. There are millions of games on Roblox where players can join servers to play with friends and strangers. 

What’s happening in “Spray Paint!” is not uncommon — nor surprising. Roblox currently has at least 18 active lawsuits pending nationwide due to inappropriate content found on its games, attorney Matthew Dolman, whose firm is representing individuals in cases against Roblox, told CBS News.

Roblox said in an emailed statement to CBS News that its 24/7 moderation system closely monitors the platform, and that the company takes “swift action against any content or users found to be in violation.”

However, hate speech still appears in Roblox games, like Spray Paint, CBS News found. “Within three minutes of getting in there for the first time, I also saw a swastika,” said Rachel Franz, the early childhood advocacy program director at the nonprofit Fairplay, which advocates for children’s online safety. 

Hate can run rampant across various Roblox games. A group called Active Shooter Studios recreates school shootings at Columbine, Uvalde and Parkland and consistently evades efforts to take down recreations, the Anti-Defamation League found in an April report. A lawsuit filed this month alleges that Roblox hosted hundreds of Sean “Diddy” Combs-themed games, as well as more than 900 user accounts registered across Roblox with variations of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s name.

“Roblox is fully aware that these experiences pervade its app, and it allows them to continue to exist unchecked despite the ability to control or eliminate them,” the lawsuit alleges, and said the effects on children can be devastating.

Last week, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed a child protection lawsuit against the platform.  

“Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety,” Murrill, a Republican, alleged in a press release. “Every parent should be aware of the clear and present danger posed to their children by Roblox so they can prevent the unthinkable from ever happening in their own home.”

In a statement to CBS News, Roblox said, “We share Attorney General Murrill’s urgency to help keep kids safe because safety has always been our priority,” adding that it looks forward to working with Murrill to help keep children safe.

“We share the critically important goal of keeping kids safe online and any assertion otherwise is categorically untrue,” Roblox’s statement said. “We hold ourselves to the highest standard and work constantly to remove violative content and bad actors.”

What children are encountering

Predators can troll Roblox, experts say, and other similar gaming platforms, to recruit young players for extremist groups or possibly sexual exploitation. 

Children and teens make up more than half of Roblox players, and about 40% of players are under the age of 13, according to a 2024 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Roblox attracts an average of 97.8 million daily active users.

“If you are a predator, it’s very clear that there are opportunities to access vulnerable folks on these platforms,” Franz said. 

When children play the Spray Paint! game, they might see slurs targeting Black and Jewish people and phrases like “KKK” and “Jew” etched in graffiti on virtual brick walls. In one server, there were over 14 instances of this speech, CBS News found, as well as a reference to the “Third Reich.” 

The phrase “I can’t breathe,” the words uttered by George Floyd, who died in 2020 in police custody by an officer later convicted of murder, was written across a virtual brick wall in one server. Some servers had graphic sexual drawings, and in another, there was an instance of suicidal language, CBS News found.

Roblox’s chat feature, available in some games, has a filtering system that prevents inappropriate content, like discriminatory speech, from being visible, but in Spray Paint! players can bypass filtering mechanisms by scrawling text via the game’s paint feature as opposed to writing in the chat, where content is filtered.

Users must enter their birthday when creating a Roblox account, but the platform doesn’t require authentication, meaning adults can pose as children and children can pose as older than they actually are. Kids can converse with other players via the voice chat feature — which has a minimum age requirement of 13 —but also doesn’t require age verification.

Roblox says the company has implemented what it calls a “trusted flagger program,” where trusted partners can report “terrorist content” in an effort to crack down on hate messages.

Roblox also says on its website that content uploaded to be incorporated into games is evaluated in a multi-step review process to screen for child sexual abuse material and other inappropriate content. If it is identified as fodder for possible child sexual abuse, Roblox says it is automatically reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit organization focusing on finding missing children and reducing child exploitation.

Roblox has developed an artificial intelligence system that the company says helped submit about 1,200 reports of potential attempts at child exploitation to NCMEC — and last year, Roblox submitted 24,522 reports to NCMEC overall.

Roblox says it has a human review team continuously evaluating flagged games and encourages users to report concerning activity. Spray Paint! players have the option to play in “safe mode,” which allows them to only view art created by other players who are on their “friends” list in the app.

A Roblox spokesperson told CBS News in an emailed statement that “while no system is perfect,” the company has implemented safeguards including “restrictions on sharing personal information, links, and user-to-user image sharing, as well as content maturity [l]abels and parental controls.” 

“We share with our community the critically important goal of keeping everyone safe online and ensuring users have positive experiences on Roblox that align with our strict Community Standards,” the statement said, adding, “We continuously innovate to deter bad actors and have launched over 50 safety features since last year.”

Despite efforts to curb extremism and the targeting of young players, experts and CBS News found that protections remain easy to override.

“There’s a larger question of how you regulate and moderate something that is supposed to encourage creativity and freedom of expression, but actually ends up introducing some really unsafe and truly harmful and disgusting practices,” Franz said.

A double-edged sword 

Allegations in several cases suggest Roblox has also been used to exploit teens and children. A Florida teenager was arrested in April for allegedly targeting children on Roblox, where he would demand child sexual abuse material over text messages or the messaging platform Discord. In Texas, a lawsuit filed in April alleges a 13-year-old girl was groomed and sexually exploited on Roblox and later, Discord. Roblox has recently been hit by a spate of lawsuits with similar claims. Dolman said his firm currently has seven cases and is investigating 400 more. Another firm filed a lawsuit earlier this month against Roblox and Discord representing over 400 people.

A man in California was arrested in April on kidnapping and sexual misconduct charges in connection with a 10-year-old he is believed to have met through Roblox. Last year, a woman in Florida was arrested for allegedly using Roblox to instruct a 10-year-old to kill an infant by dropping the 2-month-old on a tile floor. The infant was seriously injured.

When asked for a response to the lawsuits, Roblox said in an email that the company is “deeply troubled” by any incident that endangers its users, noting that safety is a top priority. 

“Roblox is committed to empowering parents and caregivers to help ensure a safe online experience for their children.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced in April that he issued a subpoena to Roblox.

“There are concerning reports that this gaming platform, which is popular among children, is exposing them to harmful content and bad actors,” he said in a press release. “We are issuing a subpoena to Roblox to uncover how this platform is marketing to children and to see what policies they are implementing—if any—to avoid interactions with predators.”

Open-world games like Spray Paint!, where users can roam a virtual space in relative anonymity, can be a double-edged sword. Doris Chang, a psychologist and associate professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work, says that these spaces can be affirming for queer youth. 

“They can be whoever they want. Gender fluidity is really common,” Chang said, adding it can also put those groups at risk for exposure to hate speech and predatory individuals. 

“You’re just interacting with people that you wouldn’t normally interact with. It’s completely wide open,” Chang said.

Chang said when children play a game like Spray Paint! without parental supervision, they may have to navigate problematic scenarios that might be confusing or upsetting. 

“It brings up the larger question about how much parents know about what their kids are getting exposed to online,” she said. “Broadly speaking, Roblox is just one corner of the internet that our kids are navigating.”

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