Recently, Chris Hansen announced he's coming after the child predators on Roblox.
Check it out.
And when Hansen says he's coming after predators, he isn't messing around.
The former "To Catch a Predator" host has been instrumental in taking down over 500 child predators over the last decade.
To Catch a Predator was canceled back in 2007 when Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt committed suicide after the teen girl he thought he was going to meet for sex turned out to be Hansen saying, "Take a seat."
But Hansen has continued his work on the TruBlu crime network.
Since predators go where the kids are (schools, amusement parks, etc.), you can bet they're on Roblox, which currently hosts approximately 45 million players under the age of 18.
Here's where things go wonky.
In the video, Hansen mentions that he's been working with a player named Schlep.
Schlep is a popular player who has been playing Roblox since he was eight years old. He's seen it all, including child predation. In fact, he was groomed on the platform when he was younger.
He doesn't go into more detail about that, but he does make it clear that those events inspired him to make the platform a better place for kids, so he started turning predators in to the police.
Six child predators were captured because of his efforts so far.
Sounds great, right?
Roblox didn't think so.
They banned him from the game — forever.
According to Forbes, Roblox says the ban is because...
'Vigilantes' have at times created an 'unsafe environment for users'.
But players disagreed. They think it's because groomers are willing to pay to play for access to kids.
And they're not alone.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced the state is going after Roblox for "facilitating child sexual abuse for profit."
Roblox immediately responded to the lawsuit with a lengthy rebuttal on their site.
At Roblox, we are constantly innovating safety tools and launching new safeguards. In the past year, Roblox has introduced over 40 new features to protect its youngest users and empower parents and caregivers with greater control, including updated parental controls, stricter defaults for users under 13, and new content maturity labels.
But recent research shows that Roblox's safeguards are woefully over-stated.
The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification...
The report also found the avatar belonging to the 10-year-old's account could access "highly suggestive environments". These included a hotel space where they could view a female avatar wearing fishnet stockings gyrating on a bed and other avatars lying on top of each other in sexually suggestive poses, and a public bathroom space where characters were urinating and avatars could choose fetish accessories to dress up in...
They also found that a test avatar registered to an adult was able to ask for the five-year-old test avatar's Snapchat details using barely coded language.
That doesn't sound safe at all.
I'll leave you with an odd take from Rolling Stone on Chris Hansen's legacy:
Why have we kept tuning in to see these creeps get caught? Why has it taken a television show to bust them? In the long run, has To Catch a Predator actually done more harm than good?
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