Attorney General Tim Griffin has filed a lawsuit against Roblox Corporation and Discord Inc. for years of deliberate deception and reckless product design that transformed the internet’s most popular children’s gaming site into one of the most dangerous places online.
Background
Roblox, which reports 144 million daily active users with about 40% under age 13, has for years assured parents that its platform is the “#1 safe gaming site for kids.” However, the company deliberately withheld age-verification technology it already possessed, rejected employee proposals to warn children of grooming behavior, and suppressed safety costs as its revenue grew.
Discord, with over 200 million monthly active users and an average user age of 16, has served as the escalation platform in the predatory pipeline. Discord deliberately engineered its product in a way that exposes children, including designing its “Family Center” to put children in control of monitoring and setting default message-filtering settings to allow adult “friends” to send unscreened content directly to children.
The lawsuit is brought under the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, Arkansas’s public nuisance law, and common law unjust enrichment. The State seeks injunctive relief, monetary damages, and the return of each company’s wrongful profits derived from Arkansas consumers.
Original reporting: NEA Report (Jonesboro) — read the source article.
