Roblox is once again under scrutiny over concerns regarding child safety on its platform, with the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism opening a bipartisan investigation into the platform yesterday.
In a letter sent to Roblox CEO David Baszucki from Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), the pair announce the investigation with a scathing recitation of Roblox’s past issues. The letter reads, in part:
You trumpet Roblox as a safe digital playground for children as young as five. But the public record raises serious questions about this promise of safety. Over the past decade, police have arrested numerous individuals for committing serious acts of violence and harm against children they met via Roblox, including grooming, sexual abuse, kidnapping, rape, and even murder. Roblox is being used to trade child sexual abuse material, participate in sexually explicit (and often violent) virtual “experiences” with children, bribe and extort children into producing explicit content, and lure children into in-person meetings. It is heartbreaking. In 2025, Roblox reported 65,381 instances of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children—more than double what it reported in 2024.
The letter goes on to say that “Roblox appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children, and the alleged criminal activity on Roblox warrants congressional scrutiny.” It warns the company that it is directed to preserve all records related to child exploitation and abuse, and is also required to answer a series of questions and produce certain documents as requested by the committee by August 31. The questions cover things like how much money Roblox makes off different age brackets, how many hours users of different ages spend in Roblox, how many Roblox accounts in 2024 and 2025 have been reported in conjunction with inappropriate behavior toward children, and what measures the company has in place to protect children.
This investigation is hardly a surprise. Roblox has been in the news multiple times a year over at least the last six years due to reports and accusations that the platform was being used to harm children. This has ranged from financial exploitation, such as what was reported by People Make Games back in 2021, all the way to sexual exploitation, as was detailed in-depth by Bloomberg in 2024. There have been reports of Roblox being used to spread far-right extremism to children, connections with real-world violence, and even with murder.
Roblox has made statement after statement (not all of which have been especially convincing) in the interest of staving off the accusations, and even made a number of changes to its platform over the years to add increased parental controls and age-locks to prevent young children from accessing dangerous content. None of it seems to have managed to stop the scary things happening on Roblox, though, especially if the number of reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children cited by the Senate are to be believed. In 2024, Roblox averaged more than 80 million players per day around the world, and roughly 40 percent of them were under 13.
“Roblox is built on the foundation of safety,” said Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman in a statement shared with Kotaku. “We do not compromise on that commitment. We look forward to sharing the facts about how we work to protect children on the platform.”
