From the Arkansas Advocate:
Arkansas is accusing social gaming platforms Roblox and Discord of profiting from putting children at risk of sexual predation in a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Tim Griffin earlier this month.
The June 11 lawsuit filed in a Los Angeles trial court claims that Roblox and Discord lied to the public about how safe their platforms are because both do not require age verification or parental consent for minors to set up accounts.
The Republican attorney general’s complaint accuses the platforms of unjust enrichment and of violating the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the Arkansas Public Nuisance Law. Both companies have more than 140 million users each.
The complaint asks the court to enjoin both companies from continuing to advertise their platforms as safe. The state also seeks $10,000 per violation of the deceptive trade practices law, as well as attorneys’ fees.
Roblox and Discord both issued statements Monday disputing the lawsuit’s allegations.
“Roblox is deeply committed to fostering a safe, healthy, and age-appropriate environment for our community,” the company’s statement reads. “…[The suit] fundamentally misrepresents how our platform works and fails to recognize the extensive, proactive measures we are taking to set a new standard in online safety.”
Discord’s statement claimed the lawsuit “does not reflect the platform we have built or the investments we have made in user safety.”
“Our safety systems combine advanced technology and human-led investigations, alongside user reports to help identify accounts or spaces engaged in harmful activity,” the statement reads. “…We look forward to collaborating with policymakers in working toward a safer online experience for all users on Discord and across the internet.”
Roblox allows users to create and play each other’s original games. Its website says the company believes in “aligning access to games and features with users’ ages.”
“Based on information and belief, there are tens of thousands of children logging onto Roblox in Arkansas with children users under 16 and tens of thousands also under 9 years of age,” the complaint states.
Discord markets itself as “the social platform for all of gaming.” The complaint does not estimate how many minors in Arkansas use Discord.
Roblox’s facial recognition software is flawed because “children have defeated it using avatar photographs, images of adults, or simply drawing wrinkles on their faces,” the complaint states.
Discord’s terms of service states that users under 13 years of age cannot set up accounts, but the platform “has no mechanism to verify that a stated birthdate is accurate, no system to screen out underage users, and no process for confirming parental consent before a child’s account is activated,” the complaint states.
“You may think that Roblox and Discord see these problems as a result of a flaw in their product,” Griffin said in a news conference Monday. “They see it as a feature. They’ve known about this, and they have had every opportunity to change it, to stop it, to do something about it, and they have refused to do that. Why? Because they’re making a lot of money.”
Both platforms are valued at billions of dollars, and Roblox’s chief financial officer told investors in 2023 that the company’s safety expenses would decrease year after year “as a point of pride,” according to the complaint.
Roblox recently launched two child protection initiatives not mentioned in the lawsuit, according to the company’s statement. The platform requires age verification in order to use chat features “so that younger users are limited to chatting with similarly aged users by default,” and it has “new age-based accounts that automatically match our youngest users” with age-appropriate games, according to the statement.
Griffin’s suit is the latest in a string of lawsuits Roblox has faced over its alleged lack of child safety measures. In April, Alabama, Nevada and West Virginia settled with the company for more than $11 million each.
Other states that have sued Roblox include Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, Florida, Iowa and Tennessee.
More than 100 families have also alleged in lawsuits, combined into a single California lawsuit, that Roblox has failed to protect children from sexual grooming and assault.
In 2023, Arkansas became the first state to require social media companies to verify children’s ages before signing up for accounts. A federal judge blocked the law in 2025, around the same time the Legislature approved changes to the 2023 law. Those changes were also blocked in federal court this year.
