Roblox players keep recreating mass shootings inside the popular video game — and the company isn’t doing it enough to stop it, an extremism researcher claims.
Users of the free online game — which Roblox says has been played by more than half of all US children under the age of 16 — have repeatedly recreated the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, in which a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people at two mosques, according to Anti-Defamation League researcher Daniel Kelley.
Kelley posted screenshots of one example, a recreation of the mosque where the massacre occurred, on Twitter this week.
“I swear to God, I would like one time to search for ‘Christchurch’ on Roblox and not find a new recreation of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting on a game platform aimed at very young children,” Kelley wrote on Friday.
Kelley told the Verge that he had also seen recreations of the Christchurch massacre in Roblox in January 2020 and in May.
“We promptly removed this experience from Roblox after it was brought to our attention and suspended the user responsible for violating our Community Rules,” a Roblox spokesperson told The Post. “We do not tolerate racism, discriminatory speech, or content related to tragic events.”
Moderating content associated with the Christchurch massacre is difficult because Christchurch is the second largest city in New Zealand, the spokesperson added. Banning the term “Christchurch” would be like banning the term “New York” because of 9/11, the spokesperson argued.
This is not the first time Roblox has been criticized for hosting extremist content. The game has also hosted recreations of Nazi armies and Roman slave camps, according to a Wired report from June.
Roblox — which went public earlier this year with a market value of $36 billion — has said that maintaining strong moderation policies is crucial to the company’s survival.
“The success of our business model is contingent upon our ability to provide a safe online environment for children to experience,” the company wrote in its IPO filing. “If we are not able to continue to provide a safe environment, our business will suffer dramatically.”