A New Report on Roblox Is Damning, Disturbing, And Should Be a Wake Up Call

Outliers or not, it suggests Roblox has not done nearly enough to keep kids safe.

Hindenburg Research—yes, named after the infamous airship disaster—is unique. They’re what’s called a “short seller,” which is to say they make money somewhat counterintuitively by betting on companies doing poorly. The truly unique part comes from the lengthy investigative reports Hindenburg Research produces about the companies it’s betting against. Their reports are designed to drop stock prices.

Importantly, their latest target is a platform we talk a lot about here, Roblox. 

Here’s a taste of some headlines that went around yesterday, in the wake of the report:

• Video game Roblox branded ‘paedophile hellscape’ for children (The Telegraph)

• Parents Warned: Roblox Is ‘a Pedophile Hellscape for Kids’ (The Daily Beast)

• Financial newsletter accuses Roblox of enabling child abuse (The Verge)

Others were, unsurprisingly, more focused on the Wall Street implications:

• Roblox Tumbles as Hindenburg Bets Against Gaming Platform (Bloomberg)

• Hindenburg Research shorts Roblox, alleging inflated metrics (Reuters)

• Short-Seller Hindenburg Goes After Roblox (The Wall Street Journal)

The report, which you can read in full here, focuses make two key claims:

1. Roblox is lying about its active users (79.5 million, as of its last earnings report), because the numbers are misleading bolstered by rampant bots and alt accounts

2. Roblox is, per the report, “an X-rated pedophile hellscape” where children will find “grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech”

You can also watch a short video that contains some of their research. Be warned.

Update: This video appears to have been taken down from YouTube. It’s still on X.

Hindenburg Research did not respond to a request for additional comment.

“We totally reject the claims made in the report,” said a Roblox spokesperson in an initial statement to The Verge. “The financial claims made by Hindenburg Research are simply misleading. The authors are, admittedly short sellers and have an agenda irrespective of the substance of Roblox’s business model and results.”

The statement from Roblox also goes into depth about, oddly enough, the company’s finances. It spends zero time refuting the more upsetting claims about its platform. 

The company later pointed Crossplay towards a much longer statement from the company called “Roblox Refutes Misleading Claims in Hindenburg Report,” where the company does, in fact, more directly address the more extreme claims about Roblox:

“Roblox takes any content or behavior on the platform that doesn’t abide by its standards extremely seriously, and Roblox has a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent malicious or harmful activity on the platform,” said the company, linking a recent trust and safety report.

As of this writing, Roblox stock has, at times, fallen as much as 9.4%.

There’s little defense for what Hindenburg Research found. It’s horrifying, and comes only months after Bloomberg’s explosive report about the pervasiveness of predators.

“With tens of millions of pre-teens but also a bunch of teenage (and post-teen!) edgelords hanging out in the game, and easy creation of 3D levels, there’s going to be a LOT of bad content,” wrote analyst Simon Carless in his GameDiscoverCo newsletter. “Roblox can—and needs to—do better here.”

Discord has a predator problem. YouTube has a predator problem. It’s pervasive on basically every popular online platforms. This is a problem of the modern internet.

The question is whether it’s representative of what most children find on Roblox, or outlandish but legitimate outliers that nonetheless point towards a misguided company more obsessed with profits than protecting the vast majority of its users, children. Worse, the two arguments work in tandem, because a company focused on profits would have less reason to spend aggressively and generously to kick content and people off Roblox. Growth runs in tension with providing a safe environment.

Photo by Gabi Repaska on Unsplash

When you get into the business of making money off minors, you should be held to incredibly strict standards. It should be hard to make money off children, and punishments for screwing up should be scary. Right now, neither are true. It’s easy to exploit children and their parents, and there’s little protecting them beyond increasingly false promises from executives, the people profiting off the exploitation.

There are conversations around legislation and regulation, but those move slowly.

One of the first major pieces I reported for Crossplay was about Roblox, and how parents work through the question of whether to allow their children to play it.

"I do not think that any gaming platform has sufficient moderations to give parents complete peace of mind," said research psychologist Dr. Rachel Kowert to me at the time. "That said, some spaces are more effectively moderated than others. But there actually lies the problem—that there is no consistency in quality or quantity of moderation or with the tools available to parents within any particular gaming space. It can be really challenging for parents to navigate these spaces, especially when they are unfamiliar with them."

I ended up letting my oldest play Roblox because her best friend wanted to spend time with her online outside of hanging out in person. It was reasonable. They still play.

But I can’t blame any parent for taking the opposite stance. Are what’s featured in the Hindenburg Research report outliers? Possibly. But a huge part of parenting is doing risk assessment on outliers and making judgment calls on what works for your family.

Plus, the blame for any outlier falls to Roblox.

Roblox doesn’t need to exist. They decided to get into the business of making money off children. The burden is theirs. It’s their responsibility to run a safe platform, and what’s frustrating is how little we can expect to change, damning headlines or not.

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

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Also:

• Roblox has survived similarly upsetting headlines and revelations in the past by simply waiting them out. I expect the same here. It’s why we need regulation.

• Absent regulation, I wish companies like Apple would apply more pressure to companies like Roblox. Unfortunately, Apple is already in hot water over where it’s decided to exert pressure elsewhere, so I do not anticipate them trying this.

• At the least, my kids play a lot less Roblox these days. Maybe it’ll stop being cool.