The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Does Gaming Have a Predator Problem?

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

TVO original documentary, Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed, follows three gamers as they investigate a network of extremists, predators and illicit content in a game designed for children. The Agenda invites Ann Shin, director and producer of the film; Jacques Marcoux, director of research and analytics at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection; and Rachel Kowert, founder of Psychgeist and visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge to discuss the potential consequences of gaming on youth. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dangerous Games, Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed is a new TVO original documentary exploring the hidden dangers of online gaming. It follows three gamers as they investigate a network of extremists, predators, and illicit content in a game designed for children. Joining us to discuss the film and the consequences of gaming on youth, we welcome in Grimstad, Norway, Rachel Cohart. She is founder of Psych Geist and visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge.

In Winnipeg, Manitoba, Jacques Marcoux, director of research and analytics at the Canadian Center for Child Protection, and with us here in our studio, Anne Shin. She is the film's director and producer. Anne, it's great to have you back here on TVO and to Rachel and Jacques and Points Beyond. Thanks for joining us as well. And just for those who don't know, give us a rundown of what inspired you to want to make this film. So the producer I work with, Erica Leendertz, her

kids were playing with an online game called Roblox and she just wanted to do some reading up on it and found some disturbing reports about predators on the game as well as extremists recruiting people. So she and I went online and we tried to get into the game as old people, it took us a while, but then once we were in the game it took us maybe three minutes only to end up in a sex den, and this is an online game for kids. So we got very alarmed and thought, wow, we really need to dig into this. And we found that there are some lawsuits,

there have been lawsuits against Roblox and other platforms. How well known do you think this story is? I think parents have been hearing more about it from kids and other youth. And there are some lawsuits that have been launched against Roblox and other youth. And there are some lawsuits that have been launched against Roblox and other platforms. But I think people on the whole don't really know that this is a problem.

They think when they're handing their tablet to their kid who's going to play an online game, it's just a game, right? They don't realize that it's a Pandora's box. It's like letting your child loose in the middle of a city alley. Like there's no regulations or law enforcement happening on these metaverse platforms. Rachel, what made you want to get involved in this?

Oh, I read some research a few years ago that talked about how prevalent these kind of incidents actually are. And I felt like no one was talking about it. And I felt like what Ann said, that parents don't really know how extreme the dangers can be in these spaces. That's my impression, is that we sort of fear this stuff is all possible, but not really. We don't necessarily think it's going to happen to our kid. Is that your understanding?

Absolutely. I mean, I think we talk a lot about cyberbullying, which is also awful and has a lot of consequences, but we don't really talk about what this looks like on the extreme end of things. Jacques, tell us about your mission at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. What do you do?

So we operate cybertip.ca. This is Canada's national tip line for reporting online sexual exploitation. We operate the tip line on behalf of Public Safety Canada, who funds our organization. And what I'm hearing here is not shocking to me or to my team at all. We are on the front lines of this issue. We get thousands of calls from Canadian kids and families per year.

This isn't unique to Roblox, and it is true that there's a bit of a false sense of security on some of these platforms where parents assume that it's safe. And I always like to remind people that whatever number you see out there, whatever statistics we see, that's the tip of the iceberg because if we have five kids reporting into us in a week, there's probably 50 who have not come forward and who have not told anyone about this. Did I hear you right? Did you say thousands of calls a year? Yeah, so we get several, we get hundreds of calls per week.

So just on Roblox alone, I ran the numbers before we gathered here. And in the past two years, we received 196 reports where the victims cited Roblox as being one of the tech platforms that was part and parcel of their exploitation. This includes 12-year-olds who were being asked for their home addresses. It includes truth or dare type games where nude images were exchanged with an offender. So this happens on the daily.

And let's just understand, because I'm sure lots of people watching this or listening have never heard of Roblox before. This is R-O-B-L-O-X. That's right. Where does the name come from? I actually don't know where the name comes from. I don't either. Yeah, but it's a game where it's like virtual Lego.

You can build your own house, you have little Lego avatars, and that's where the problems arise because you're meeting other avatars in the space. The avatar might tell you, I'm a 15-year-old boy. Meanwhile, he could be a 43-year-old man. So there's really no way to know who you're online with. No. And that's why these are platforms where it's attractive to kids and attractive to other people as well who might be interested in areas where kids congregate.

Katie is the character, I mean, one of the protagonists in your film. Tell us about Katie and her experience. Katie is a young woman now, but as an early teen, she had befriended a developer on Roblox. He went by the handle Dr. Rofotnik. She really liked the game Sonic, or the movie Sonic, and there was a game on Roblox that was developed by Dr. Rofotnik that really created the Sonic experience.

Is Sonic the Hedgehog, is that who we're talking about? That's right, Sonic the Hedgehog, yeah. And so she really liked the game, she befriended him, she was so chuffed and pleased that the developer Yeah. And so she really liked the game. She befriended him. She was so chuffed and pleased that the developer of this really popular Roblox game gave her time and they hit it off. And the next thing you know, he was sending her digital gloves for drawing online, sending her gifts from Amazon and trying to like groom her.

She started getting very uncomfortable when they were texting and it turned to sexting. And he would say really rude and sometimes very violent things to her about what he wanted to do to her. And how old was she at the time? I think she was 12 when she met him. Rachel, how common is this? It's more common than we think. As was just said by the other guest,

research says only 1% to 2% of people report this is happening. Just generally across games when something disruptive happens, only 1% to 2% reporting. So more than we think. And, Chuck, just to add to what Rachel said, Snapchat and a couple of other tech companies have released their own internal research that suggests that upwards of two-thirds of teenagers know someone or they have personally been targeted in these types of ways online.

These are the numbers we're dealing with. It's incredibly high. I'll say that if you talk to any teenager in your life, boy, girl, in any Canadian high school, they all have stories, every single one of them. You say targeted. Is there, I mean, how does the offender, the alleged offender, have any idea who he, I'm gonna say he, because it's almost always he,

who he's communicating with? So the first thing to know about these types of scams is that offenders go where the kids are. So there's this misconception sometimes that online offending happens in these dark, unknown corners of the internet, but it actually happens primarily in plain sight on mainstream platforms that millions

of Canadian kids have on their devices. And it often plays out across a number of platforms. So places like Roblox are often just the gateway to connect. It's like a phone book on where you can connect with children and offenders will target hundreds of them at the same time. And invariably, a certain percentage of kids will fall for it. And then often they then get moved to another platform where they can maybe engage in a more private conversation, like on WhatsApp or Signal or some encrypted chat platform. So it often plays out across multiple platforms and offenders know what the gaps are, what

the moderation gaps are, and they leverage those gaps to hop around and not have those interactions be intercepted. So that's really how it plays out. Rachel, can you follow up on that in as much as, I mean, this seems like a breeding ground for exactly the kind of thing that parents would not want to see. How does that happen?

It's really difficult because as we just mentioned, it's a funnel. So you put out a comment and you see who laughs or you see who reacts and then slowly you funnel down into finding the vulnerable population. And what makes it extra difficult is from the outside looking in, it looks like someone making friends.

It feels good. It feels nice to have someone give you attention just like we were talking about with Katie. And then it quickly turns and by time it turns, it's difficult to know where to turn for help. The friend that you discovered this all with in the original episode that you told me about, where in three minutes you were in and you'd figured out what was going on,

how did she handle things once she realized what was going on? Well, what she did was Erika Linditz, who is the producer of this film, made sure that her kids didn't have access to the chat apps. And she told and she informed them about it. And I think that's one of the steps that parents can take, where they get involved with the games that the kids are playing so they know where they're playing and what they're doing. It's like literally, I mean, there's a million, there's a hundred million users on Roblox a day. They're all creating these environments. All over the world, I presume.

Yes, exactly. So when you release a child into this environment, it's like letting them into this mega city alone at night. You wouldn't do that in the real world. So why would a parent, why should a parent do that, you know, in the virtual world? So get involved with the kids and play the games and also monitor who they're talking with and what kinds of experiences they're getting into.

Do the kids have any sense about, I mean this experience that you referenced seemed to get dark very quickly. Yes. Do the kids understand sort of the difference between what's real and what's very problematic here? The distance between what's in real life and what's online virtual is very thin for a lot of the gamers and a lot of the people who find their real communities online. And so how they are as avatars is like how they see themselves.

Some kids often see themselves as better expressed in the online world. So whatever happens to the avatar there, it's like it's happening to their body. It's like they're happening to them. Rachel, that's a pretty, I mean that's a pretty tough thing for a parent to fight. If there's this alternative universe where a child can realize some ambitions or aspirations that they perhaps don't get at school where things are all too real. What are parents and kids supposed to do about that?

I think it is truly about talking with your children and understanding that it is a false dichotomy and that online and offline, they're very fluid. So instead of thinking about online games as like this separate space where my kids are and I don't really understand or it's not important or it doesn't matter, we can't think like that anymore. That's not what the reality is in the 21st century.

So we have to talk to our children about what are you doing and who are you talking to, just like you would, what are you doing at school and who are you playing with? It's the same. That will, Jacques, I assume, take some training for parents who are accustomed to handing the iPad to the kid and saying, go over there and make yourself useful for the next hour and leave me alone.

Right, we gotta take a different approach here. Yeah, my organization has really pushed back against this drive to download the responsibility to be safe onto end users. So tech companies like to present solutions as being the sole responsibility of children and adults to be safe within these environments that they create. They make conscious design decisions

on how they make these systems. And they are inherently dangerous in many ways for many people, especially children. But when it comes time to tell the public that they're doing work to solve these problems, invariably it's always more work on adults. It would be like if we designed dangerous vehicles, and instead of having a recall and fixing the problem, we simply made a PSA to teach people how to drive the vehicle in such a way that it won't

explode or the wheel won't fall off. That's what's happening right now instead of having, for example, laws that would require companies to ensure that the services they make available to kids in Canada or adults are safe to begin with from the ground up when they design it. And Jacques, a quick follow-up. What percentage of offenders here, I guess is that what you call them? Or what do you call them?

We call them offenders most of the time. Offenders, okay. What percentage of them do you think get caught? It's incredibly small. The reality is that a lot of offenders aren't on Canadian soil. If I take the example of online sextortion, which has impacted tens of thousands of Canadians

over the past two years, most of these offenders are part of organized crime groups in Nigeria. This is specific to financial sextortion. A lot of times the offenders aren't on Canadian soil. If we look at the poster child for this, Amanda Todd, the offender was in Europe, and that took a decade and millions of dollars

in resources to try one single person. But this happens hundreds of times a day. So the reality is that the clearance rates for these when it falls in the lap of law enforcement is incredibly low. And it's in part because it's not because police aren't doing their work. It's because it's almost impossible to do. You have companies who hold all the cards. They have all the data. It's very difficult for Canadian police to get a production order for a company

that may be hosted in Eastern Europe or somewhere in the US, and then to track down an offender that may be abroad. So going to police and expecting to resolve these issues through a crime and justice perspective or approach is simply not gonna work. We can't police our way out of this problem. And let's do another example from your film,

Janay, another one of the people that you profile. Tell us Janay's story. Janay was a Minecraft player. She's a young black woman who lives in Florida. And every time she would spawn herself into a game in Minecraft, get born into a game, she found herself getting killed. And it's called a spawn killing, when people just jump on you for no reason and kill you right as you start a game.

And that was when she was wearing her avatar, like her avatar was wearing a black skin. So what she did was she tried playing with a white skin. She found she was not being spawn killed anymore. This was so upsetting to her that she started up a group called Black Minecraft and she created a space for other black Minecraft players that was safe, they could talk there, gather,

and it became a real community. So this is a real testament to how there's strong and positive things happening in these, you know, metaverse spaces as well. There's these community groups created for black Minecraft players to meet and kind of talk and tell each other their experiences. So the child abuse wasn't enough. They had to be racist as well. Well, everything you get in real life you get online, but even more so because everyone's hiding behind the anonymity of their avatars.

Rachel, the film brings up, and people, I think, in southern Ontario will remember this, because it was just a few years ago, a few years ago this month, I think, a horrific mass shooting that took place in Buffalo, New York, 10 people killed in a grocery store. And the shooter actually blamed his own personal radicalization on a game in Roblox.

How does that happen? That is a big question for a small answer. How it happens is that these spaces, like Ann was saying, they reflect real life, but you're also in this bubble of online disinhibition. So you have this veil of anonymity. Nobody knows me. Nobody sees me. And you can quickly fall into these dark

corners where you feel there are little to no repercussions. And if you fall down that funnel, it's also a funnel just like for grooming. It's a radicalization funnel. It becomes amplified like an echo chamber on these corners of the Internet. And that then in some cases, in extreme cases, translates into real world action. Jacques, I think those of us in Canada would like to think that this is a more American

than Canadian phenomenon because that is a culture that's actually a lot more extreme than we are. I see you shaking your head already, not the case? The kids, I mean, the internet is a, it's a global tool. It's a global tool, there are no borders. It's what makes it rich in information, but it's also what makes it incredibly difficult to control, to regulate, to ensure it's safe.

And so, yeah, there's, the solutions aren't obvious, but what we do know is that the solutions that are being proposed right now that often come from a self, an unregulated but apparently self-regulated industry makes it such that a lot of these issues just go unresolved repeatedly. Okay, we're going to talk about a word that I know all the kids use and that all the adults don't understand. So here we go. The word is doxing. And this comes up in the documentary,

and we're going to show a clip here, and then we'll come back and chat. Sheldon, if you would, from Dangerous Games. Roblox has been such a whirlwind for me in a sense that it's, like, contributed to my mental health issues. Like, it really has. I tried to end my life multiple times with a Roblox.

Really? Yeah. The hate got really bad. Like it's really has tried to end my life multiple times over roblox really yeah The hate got really bad. It's not your fault. It really sucks when When you do decide to go ahead and tell people and it's about a content creator that everybody else likes yeah And then you think and then I think you're trying to cancel them. Those people don't, they don't understand what it's like to be playing a game and get harassed in your game every single time you play or what it's like for somebody to use a game to try to lure you and try to harm you. You know? Why is this a normal thing and why do we keep on allowing it? There needs to be more talks on what are we going to allow

and what are we not going to allow in the virtual space. And if somebody does violate that, what consequence is it going to be? Good questions. She should go into journalism. Those are good questions. Doxing, what is D-O-X-X-I-N-G? What is that?

It's when people will take your personal details and publicize it to everybody, including your address, your phone number, your identity, with the idea to expose you, but also to enable and incite harassment. People have had SWAT teams called on them in their homes. It's a false call. Light versions of that might be getting pizzas,

like 100 pizzas delivered to your home, and that kind of thing. But doxing can be, it's like trolling times 100 because you're being targeted in your real life home and in your identity, yeah. And Rachel, the psychological ramifications of being doxed can be what? Long-term post-traumatic stress disorder

at the most extreme cases. Doxing is a serious threat to someone's life. If you mistakenly, not mistakenly, if you call a SWAT team on someone under false pretenses, that can lead to loss of life. It's incredibly traumatic. And again, it goes back to this idea that what's happening in these spaces

doesn't just magically live in these spaces. They impact you in all of the ways that you walk through life. Jacques, in this film, the girls actually try to solve these issues and these problems on their own. Is that the right approach to take in your view? We get, it saddens me that that's the case, that kids feel like that's what they have to do. And we hear that all the time from kids where they self-police, they get doxed, their intimate images are distributed online, they self-police. We've had kids pretend to be lawyers, send fake legal demands that they found online

to companies in an attempt to get content removed. So we hear about this all the time. Those kids, I want them to know that there are resources, there are people who can help. It's important that they tell someone that they trust. It can be a parent, it can be a teacher, it can be police, it can be a tip line like us who are there to help. But it's important that these cases get onto the radar. It's important that we understand the prevalence

of these cases and these kids shouldn't, I really do not think that any kid should have to go at this alone because this is just an incredibly traumatic experience for them, and it follows them along for a long time. It can have lifelong consequences for a lot of kids. And what do we know about whether or not parental complaints against Roblox have been heard and attended to by that company? So they have been heard.

Recently, Roblox created changes where the parental control, they created an access point for parents to see who the kids are chatting with and also what experiences they're getting into, what kinds of rooms and experiences they're getting access to. So they enhanced the parental controls on the platform. But they themselves, Roblox hasn't hired more human moderators

to moderate all these spaces that exist. And an important chat app, Discord, where a lot of the grooming continues, has not done anything to change the level of security or safety that's addressed, safety or security concerns for kids. Rachel, what would you say in terms of whether more legislation slash regulation is needed here? Do you think that can do anything? I do think legislation can make change. And I think it already is with the Online Safety Act

and the Kids' Online Safety Act being discussed in Canada, as well as other countries around the globe. I think it has led to changes already, like the ones that Anne has mentioned. I think it's also important to understand that it is such a scale issue. So I don't know if like more parental controls are obviously great, but it's going to take a really big kind of revolution

in terms of thinking about how to design these spaces to be safer and how can we go about providing resources for when these kinds of things do happen. And follow up on that if you would, because I think at the, well, I shouldn't give away the ending here. What the hell, I'm giving away the ending. You say in the film that we had a bill that

was designed to deal with this in Parliament. Parliament of course got pro-rogue, we had an election. Okay, we're back to square one with this now? Yes. We are back to square one because the Online Harm Safety Act in Canada has been, it was developed, but it's not passed. And the Kids Online Safety Act in the States was passed in the House, but it didn't pass in the Senate.

And in both countries there's been problems because there are lobbyists who talking about the difficulties in enhancing like content control for platforms. If platforms are going to censor certain types of material what might prevent them from censoring other types of material for political motivations and so the debate around this has been complex. But I think Rachel is right in saying that, you know, at least we're being more vocal about it and platforms are being more aware. But we really do need to legislation.

Law needs to catch up to technology. Like as we know with AI, law has been very lagging. It's behind in terms of catching up to the technology and we're hoping that these bills will pass soon. This is a race in so many sectors and technology is winning almost every time. Anyways, I want to thank the three of you for coming on to TVO tonight and helping us understand this issue a lot better. Rachel Coard, founder of PsychGeist, that's P-S-Y-C-H-G-E-I-S-T, that's a great name.

She's a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. Jacques Marcoux from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and Anne Shin, the director and producer of Dangerous Games, Roblox, and the Metaverse Exposed. Thanks you three. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.