Alabama on Tuesday became the second state to announce an agreement with Roblox regarding protecting the safety of children on the gaming platform.
The company will pay the state $12.2 million, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said, calling the settlement a victory for the children and their parents.
“Platforms that host child consumers must do their part to give parents a chance to protect their children from harm,” he said in a statement. “While parents will always play the lead role in protecting their children online, we are raising the bar for what we expect from gaming platforms: parents need a partner, not a black box.”
Funds from the settlement will be used to fund school resource officers across the state.
Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief security officer, wrote in an emailed statement that the settlement “reflects a shared commitment to the safety and well-being of Alabama students.”
“This resolution supports Alabama’s Safe School initiative and the vital role of school resource officers, and strengthens our work to set the benchmark for digital safety,” Kaufman wrote. “We appreciate this collaboration with the State of Alabama and remain dedicated to our shared goal of helping protect young people online.”
The news comes as Roblox, a social gaming platform with over 151 million users, finds itself mixed with legal hot water over alleged child safety issues in its user-created games, including sexual predators preying on children and sexually explicit or violent content.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall speaks during a news conference in front of Manhattan Criminal Court, May 13, 2024, in New York.File Stefan Jérémie / APLast week, Nevada became the first to reach an agreement with Roblox with a $12 million settlement.
Both settlements were negotiated in lieu of formal lawsuits by the states.
Under both deals, the company committed to stricter safeguards, including requiring age verification for all users, expanding parental controls and ending all encryption of chats for minors.
Roblox has rolled out a host of security protocols over the past few months and years, including a suite of parental controls, increasingly strict age verification policies, and fully segregated age-based accounts for minors, which launch in June.
But the platform continued to face negative reactions from parents and officials.
More than 100 families also sued the company over its alleged failure to protect children from being groomed or molested by predators on Roblox. Their individual suits 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 going to children’s programs in the state over the next three years, and the rest to fund a Nevada-based law enforcement liaison business and a two-year online safety awareness campaign.
At a press conference Tuesday, Marshall said some of the announced changes in Alabama’s regulations have already been implemented, while others will take place between May 1 and September 1.
“We also believe that we have created a framework that can be followed by states across the country and that will protect not only the children of Alabama, but the children of the United States,” he said.
A Roblox spokesperson also told NBC News that the company views its first agreement with Nevada as a “model” for how industry leaders and regulators can work together.
