Are your kids spending hours with random adults online?
Roblox is an online playground where kids can create virtual worlds...but adults are also making content and grooming pre-teens into school shooters inside a virtual Columbine High.
Would you let your 8-year-old kid hangout for hours at a playground alone with a bunch of random adults? I think most parents would give an emphatic “no!” to that question. But is your kid spending hours playing Roblox without your supervision?
Roblox has about 120M daily users and half are under age 12. Roblox is popular with young kids because it lets them play, create, and socialize freely in a simple to edit, colorful, cartoon-like world with endless user-made experiences.
It combines social networking, user-generated content, and customized characters into a virtual world that kids can spend a near-infinite amount of time exploring.
However, the platform has minimal age verification and limited content regulation which means that young children can easily access maps or chats with inappropriate material while having direct interactions with adults that aren’t moderated.
If your kids are playing Roblox, did you know there are virtual playgrounds that recreate Columbine High?
Did you know that kids can customize their characters to look like prior school shooters?
There’s even a map that lets characters play out the Columbine shooting from the perspective of the black and white security cameras in the cafeteria.
Kids can also play a simulation inside Robb Elementary with a countdown until police arrive. For a kid who is 7 or 8-years-old right now, they were ~4-years-old when the Uvalde attack happened so they might just see this as a game:
It’s not just school shootings, there is also a map for the Buffalo supermarket mass shooting:
From looking at the in-game chat and you can see how easy it is for kids find this content:
The hashtags for this map to play a school shooting simulation are “carbine”, “school”, “shooting”, “TCC”, “Roblox”, “game”, and “Parkland”. To avoid the minimal content review on Roblox, there is a link posted in the chat for a Discord group that has totally encrypted and untraceable communications. The song tagged in the post is “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People which is not directly about a specific school shooting, but its lyrics about a person with a “quick hand” and “running from the pack” is frequently posted by accounts that glorify mass shootings and prior school shooters.
Roblox Lawsuit After Teen’s Suicide
The mother of a teenager who died by suicide is suing Roblox, accusing the company of worrying more about its investors than the children in its audience. The complaint, filed this month, claims Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, who’ve collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the gaming company, fostered a platform that monetizes children at the cost of their safety.
Attorneys for Jaimee Seitz filed the lawsuit in the eastern district of Kentucky. Seitz is the mother of Audree Heine, a teen girl who committed suicide just after her 13th birthday in 2024. When detectives investigated Heine’s death they found she had a vast online social life that centered around groups in Discord and Roblox that idolized school shooters like Dylan Kleebold. Since Heine’s death, Seitz has been outspoken about the unique dangers of Roblox.
Heine’s family claims she would never have died had Roblox done a better job of moderating its platform. “Audree was pushed to suicide by an online community dedicated to glorifying violence and emulating notorious mass shooters, a community that can thrive and prey upon young children like Audree only because of Defendants’ egregiously tortious conduct,” the complaint said.
What can parents do?
Aside from school shootings, Roblox is an easy way for predators to interact with young kids through the protection of a VPN to hide their identity and try to lure them into even more private online spaces. Learning about how this grooming happens and monitoring your kid’s online activity is the best way to prevent online radicalization. Here is a clip about Roblox:
Learn more:
Ep 60. Inside the True Crime Community (TCC) that grooms teens into school shooters. The last 7 school shooters were all connected with the same online group that shares violent gore content, fan art idolizing prior school shooters, and encourages members to commit real-world violence
Ep 57. TCC, gore videos, groypers, and online radicalization. Allizandra Herberhold, LMSW, is a deradicalization coach and explains how online communities are grooming teens and young adults to commit real world violence.
Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’
Discord Platform: What schools and parents need to know to prevent a school shooting
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.