A new lawsuit alleges that Roblox and Discord are culpable in failing to protect a 13-year-old girl who died by suicide.
The lawsuit filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Covington Division, by Jaimee Seitz, claims that the apps Discord and Roblox were responsible for her daughter Audree Heine’s suicide.
The complaint maintains that Heine was pushed to suicide by “an online community dedicated to glorifying violence and emulating notorious mass shooters, a community that can thrive and prey upon young children like Audree only because of Defendants’ egregiously tortious conduct.”
As explained in the complaint, the online community in question, the True Crime Community, “idolizes mass shooters and overlaps with other violent and extremist ideologies,” revered the perpetrators of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and “depicted them as misunderstood outcasts who took revenge on their bullies, and encouraged violence against oneself and others.”
The lawsuit identified Roblox as a “central location for TCC content,” including games designed to recreate past mass shootings. It cited Discord as the source of “advice on constructing school-shooting simulators and designing Roblox avatars that resemble notorious school shooters.”
“Through their pervasive misrepresentations about safety, Defendants portray their apps as appropriate places for children to play,” reads the lawsuit. “In reality, and as Defendants well know, the design of their apps makes children easy targets for predatory behavior.”
“Malicious users, often adults, use Defendants’ platforms to target vulnerable children and then to groom them for sexual exploitation or for violence. These similar predatory processes involve the kinds of manipulation and pressure that Audree experienced over Roblox and Discord.”
The lawsuit claims that the platforms failed to implement adequate safety features to protect underage users. For example, according to the complaint, Discord and Roblox lack adequate age verification for users.
Anapol Weiss, a law firm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that has filed several lawsuits against Roblox in the past, is representing Seitz.
“This is not about a minor lapse in safety, it’s about a company that gives pedophiles powerful tools to prey on innocent and unsuspecting kids,” said Alexandra Walsh, a partner at Anapol Weiss, in a statement.
“The trauma that results is horrific, from grooming, to exploitation, to actual assault. In this case, a child lost her life. This needs to stop.”
The family’s lawsuit is the 12th lawsuit Anapol Weiss has filed against online gaming platforms for alleged inadequate protection of minors, which the lawfirm claims “indicates a pattern of corporate disregard for child safety.”
Discord has long been criticized for its alleged failure to protect children who use the platform, with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation putting the communications app on its “Dirty Dozen” list for the past four years.
“Even though Discord claims to have made changes to prevent exploitation, these policies are merely performative. NCOSE and other child safety experts have proven these safety changes to be defective,” stated NCOSE in March.
“Furthermore, adults and minors still have the same default settings for explicit content, meaning minors still have total access to view and send pornography and other sexually explicit content on Discord servers and in private messages.”
Last November, Roblox announced that it would implement several child safety measures, including remote parental management of child accounts, caregivers being able to set time limits on daily screentime, restrictions on communication for users under the age of 13, and greater limits on access to graphic content.
“Since the day we launched, we’ve had a growing population of younger users and we want to help keep them safe on Roblox. We take safety extremely seriously,” the company stated.
“Our goal is to make Roblox the safest and most civil online platform possible because it is the right thing for children, their parents and caregivers, our investors, and our company.”
