The gaming platform Roblox is extremely popular. Free to download and easy to get started, Roblox hosts dozens of different user-created games to play on a phone, tablet, computer, or console.
But the online world of Roblox can also be a dangerous place. In recent years, parents have spoken up about the platform harboring child predators. That’s been followed by a number of lawsuits claiming the company hasn’t done enough to protect its young users.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is among those who’ve sued Roblox for allegedly exposing kids to sexually explicit material. Now, the attorney general says the company isn’t cooperating with the court.
Paul Flahive, business litigation and bankruptcy reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, spoke to the Texas Standard about the state’s allegations.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Can you give us a few more details about what the state of Texas claims Roblox is doing in the lawsuit?
Paul Flahive: Yeah, Texas filed a 70-plus page petition with the court saying it marketed itself as safe for children, but allowed sexual predators to offer explicit material and exploit kids on its platform — offering few, if any, protections for those kids and trading in engagement for child safety.
Well, I mentioned there are a number of lawsuits, but is Texas the only state to make this move?
No, it’s one of, I wanna say, 10 states that have sued. Roblox has settled a number of those cases and in its last quarterly earnings report said something like $91 million has been spent in settlements or in the work to get to a settlement.
What does Attorney General Paxton say about the level of cooperation he’s received from Roblox as the trials proceeded?
Yeah, the state has been complaining that Roblox is stonewalling it on discovery for months. It says it asked it to answer 11 interrogatories and respond to 45 document requests, and by Thursday it had had almost no responses.
It said in the last week it had more production than in the previous seven months and connected it to this recent hearing and has asked a court to continue having these hearings intermittently to ensure that more production is happening.
It’s especially interested in trying to get CEO David Baszucki’s documents and emails since they say he is the major decision-maker — he’s the largest shareholder, he decides on what gets implemented and what doesn’t, and he’s also the one making these public statements that the platform is safe.
Well, as you mentioned, Roblox is no stranger to these lawsuits — lots of settlements. I mean, is Paxton asking for something in this lawsuit that other lawsuits haven’t?
Well, Roblox is saying that they just were asking for too much, that their request was overbroad. And they started to sort of imply that maybe the state hadn’t really done its homework before it filed this 71-page petition filled with allegations saying essentially that it was a phishing expedition, that if they were to narrow their requests, they could produce more documents, they could get them the answers that they wanted.
And they connected their recent successes in producing documents and things like that to the state and starting to narrow its request formats.
Do you get the idea that Paxton is hoping for a big settlement from Roblox, or is there something else that he’s aiming for?
Well, you know, his motivations are his own. I don’t claim to understand them.
He is in a Senate race currently. Big tech companies are very unpopular in the country nationwide. And we’ve seen a flurry of lawsuits from his office against all of the major tech companies in the last couple of years. So I’ll let listeners draw their own conclusions.
But right now, there’s a Nov. 15 deadline for Roblox to respond and be substantially completed with, at least, the document production. And the judge also was open to extending that if it wasn’t clearly gonna happen.
But right now it looks like the case is gonna keep going forward and they have a tentative potential trial date in February of 2028. So not anytime soon.
