Condobloke
Well-Known Member
Hello there,
My son doesn't read the child-in-the-woods stories anymore. He's grown beyond that stage, with the terrors of bears and witches and the Bad Banksia Men just cloudy memories of many years past.
My son and his online gaming peers around the world now fight real monsters, full-grown adult monsters who slip into their games, undeterred by "anti-predator controls". And the kids, just like their story-book counterparts, find themselves abandoned in the woods by the adults who should be looking out for them.
Online gaming has given sexual predators easy access to the lives of young people: they are meeting them online through multiplayer video games and chat apps, making virtual connections right in their victims' homes. Young gamers are more aware of this than they probably say to their parents — but now they have a kind of superhero who has swooped in to protect them, and he has exposed just how pathetic the platforms can be at policing their own.
The gaming platform Roblox is engaged in an ugly public stoush with a high-profile gamer, and the howling community that supports him, after they banned the gamer known as "Schlep" for his vigilantism in exposing predators on their platform.
Schlep is a Texas-based YouTuber with more than 800,000 subscribers and has posed as a young gamer on Roblox to catch predators. With a team of collaborators, he poses as underage players in Roblox games, responds to adult users who contact him, lets them make incriminating statements — unprompted, he says — then arranges real-world meetups where the person is detained by law enforcement.
Schlep claims his efforts have led to at least six arrests. He has also teamed with reporter Chris Hansen from NBC's To Catch a Predator.
Schlep, whose first name is Andrew, had an early and traumatic encounter with a groomer on Roblox that led to a suicide attempt. He and his family were so dismayed by the platform's lack of response (they banned the older player years later, and only after problems on another platform) that Schlep took matters into his own hands, working closely, he says, with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and the Arkansas Police Department — although there are no public statements from the police about these stings.
If you were Roblox, you'd be horrified, wouldn't you?
Horrified to discover that paedophile predators were roaming your platform with no line of sight from your own "moderation" with individual gamers feeling compelled to become the protectors.
Roblox was indeed horrified — but at Schlep. They issued him a "cease and desist" notice for, of all things, "simulated child endangerment" and the high crime of taking conversations off platform.
Despite well-documented instances of Roblox's failure to police its own site, the platform insisted on its own methods.
Roblox issued a statement: "Actions taken by vigilante groups increase the risk of more users being exposed to bad actors and can delay enforcement efforts by both Roblox and law enforcement." Roblox added that vigilantism could result in "removal and banning, where warranted."
Schlep has now been kicked from the platform, and thousands of his supporters are going with him — perhaps my son amongst them.
Schlep told Rolling Stone that he had always wanted to work with Roblox to make the platform safer, but that the company had been a "brick wall".
"I've made it clear since the beginning," he said. "After one of my first catches, I was like, 'Hey, I want to work with you. I was a victim of the platform. This is why I do it. And I would love some form of communication where I can just directly report these people to you, because their reports just don't work'."
If you have kids who game you won't want to know, but will need to hear, that "paedophile hunting" is a booming genre of social media content.
Social media and online gaming are lousy with groomers and opportunists and it's shocking to any parent that the developers have always feigned a mild kind of ignorance of this. They point to keyword identification in their online chat systems and age-limited sign-up rules as their protections and then pump their platforms full of candy in the form of games the kids can't resist.
Here in Australia, Roblox has been excluded from the federal government's under 16s social media ban, as it's classified as a game and because of something they describe as "regulatory overlap" — meaning the eSafety commissioner already has responsibility for this one.
Mind you, as diligent as the commissioner is, that's rather like expecting a well-intentioned entomologist to police a swarm of locusts: the online game companies present a sympathetic public face, but they are ungovernable.
So that's where Schlep came in. I assume he's a creature of his culture, and having grown up consuming stories of his iteration of vigilantes — from Dirty Harry through to John Wick — in the end he knew his job was to take on the bad guys himself. Roblox certainly wasn't doing it.
Schelp is also a child of his times: they have had to become educated — perhaps far too young — in the horrors of the online world and the need to check all the doors, all the windows into the gaming paradises we let them loose in, trusting far too much in the tech giants who lured us all.
I can see that broken trust in the disappointment of my son, but like the hero movies he loves, his generation's Spiderman has swung into action, and that seems to have restored some of his faith.
How disillusioning for him to realise that, like every story-book child that has gone before him, he's been left in the woods with the monsters, and all us adults gone.
This weekend we have Aunty Donna and air guitar for you — what else do you need?
Have a safe and happy weekend and the soundtrack this week is provided by Schlep himself. If you have young people in your life online, then you need to see this. Take care and go well.
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