Alabama became the second state on Tuesday to announce a settlement with Roblox over child safety protections on the gaming platform.
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The company will pay the state $12.2 million, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said, calling the settlement a victory for children and their parents.
“Platforms that host child consumers must do their part to give parents a fighting chance to shield their children from harm,” he said in a statement. “While parents will always play the primary role in protecting their children online, we are raising the bar on what we expect from gaming platforms—parents need a partner, not a black box.”
The settlement funds will be used to finance school resource officers across the state.
The news comes as Roblox, a social gaming platform with over 151 million users, finds itself embroiled in legal hot water over alleged child safety issues in its user-made games, including child predators and sexually explicit or violent content.
Last week, Nevada became the first to reach a deal with Roblox with a $12 million settlement. Both the state settlements were negotiated in lieu of official lawsuits from the states.
Under the terms of both settlements, the company pledged to enforce stricter safeguards, including by requiring age verification for all users, expanding parental controls and ending all encryption on chats for minors.
Roblox has rolled out a slew of safety protocols in recent months and years, including a suite of parental controls, increasingly strict age verification policies and wholly separate age-based accounts for minors to launch in June.
But the platform has continued to face backlash from parents and officials.
More than 100 families have also sued Roblox over its alleged failure to prevent children from being groomed or assaulted by predators on Roblox. Their individual lawsuits are now consolidated into multidistrict litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
At least seven states also have pending litigation against Roblox.
With the Nevada settlement, Roblox agreed to pay $12.5 million, with the majority to be funneled into children’s programs in the state over the next three years, and the rest to fund a company law enforcement liaison and an online safety awareness campaign.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Marshall said some of the changes announced in the Alabama settlement have already been implemented, while others will take place between May 1 and Sept. 1.
“We also think that we have created a framework that can be mirrored by states across the country that will not only protect Alabama’s children, but will protect America’s kids,” he said.
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