Roblox and Meta are Purposely Damaging Our Kids, What the Lawsuits Say About Power, Profit, and Protecting Kids

The lead case was filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, with additional state actions running in parallel. It’s an extraordinary show of state power aimed squarely at the business model of attention extraction that defines social media. And it’s not isolated. Roblox, the gaming platform that is effectively the social network for millions of children, faces a fast‑growing cascade of lawsuits alleging it failed to protect kids from predators and built systems that made grooming easier, not harder. If you’re looking for a turning point in platform accountability for children, this may be it.

State AGs didn’t tiptoe. They allege Meta’s “infinite scroll,” social reward mechanics (likes, streaks, notifications), and pushy engagement loops are designed to hook kids and correlate with harms like anxiety, insomnia, and school interference, while Meta publicly downplayed risks. They also say Meta had “actual knowledge” of under‑13 users and still gathered their data, triggering COPPA. That coalition spans red and blue states—Arizona to New York, Virginia to Washington. It’s rare, it’s muscular, and it specifically targets design, not just content moderation theater. That focus is critical: it reframes the problem from “bad posts” to “predatory mechanics.” See the filings and state press materials for details and participating states in New York, Colorado, and California announcements, each describing the same theory of harm and legal posture. Read the NY Attorney General press release.

The Roblox litigation wave is less centralized but no less revealing. Families across the country have filed suits alleging negligent design, inadequate age verification, weak moderation, and features that make it easy for adults to impersonate peers, establish trust via in‑game chat or “Robux,” and migrate children to less‑regulated apps for exploitation. Investigations and suits from state officials and families are piling up, and new cases continue to be filed—an unmistakable sign of mounting systemic risk. Recent reporting underscores the state‑level scrutiny, including criminal subpoenas and AG actions that explicitly frame Roblox as a predator‑friendly environment and demand accountability for safety failures. Additional litigation filings and coverage detail claims of grooming pipelines and platform design choices under fire.

The Design Choices Under Indictment

This moment is less about a single feature and more about an architecture of engagement that, when pointed at children, becomes a health hazard. On social: endless feeds, intermittent reinforcement, and social comparison loops. On Roblox: open‑ended communication, insufficient age assurance, content sprawl with inconsistent guardrails, and seamless migration pathways to off‑platform channels. The legal theory converges on a simple assertion: these systems were not accidents; they were business choices. The Meta complaints emphasize manipulative features and COPPA violations as unfair and deceptive practices under state law.

Read the California AG press release.

There’s a broader trend worth naming: states filling a federal vacuum. Congress has stalled on comprehensive protections such as KOSA and COPPA 2.0. So AGs are using UDAP statutes, COPPA enforcement theories, and public nuisance arguments to force changes in product design. It’s the same playbook we’ve seen in opioids and vaping—when Washington dithers, states litigate. That has consequences: settlements can rewrite product defaults faster than rulemaking ever could.

The Stakes for Democracy and the Next Internet

If you care about democratic resilience, this is not an adjacent issue—it’s core. Healthy democracies require healthy information environments and citizens capable of navigating them. When platforms normalize surveillance‑based engagement for children and outsource risk to families and schools, they externalize costs onto the public realm: classrooms manage attention fallout; pediatricians triage anxiety and sleep disruption; prosecutors chase predators strategically enabled by design. This isn’t just a consumer dispute—it’s a transfer of public health risks from corporations to communities.

There’s also a market power dimension. The dominant players set the design standards others follow. If Meta is compelled to harden defaults—true age assurance, teen‑safe mechanics by design, data minimization for minors—those choices can cascade across the industry. Likewise, if Roblox is forced to decouple monetization and social affordances from safety‑critical features—separating adults and minors by default, narrowing chat to verified connections, enforcing real age verification, and pre‑publication review for experiences likely to be accessed by kids—the “acceptable baseline” for child platforms rises. That’s how norms shift: not through PR, but through court‑enforceable obligations.

What Real Reform Looks Like

• Age assurance with teeth: no more honor‑system birthdays; adopt privacy‑preserving age estimation backed by verifiable parental consent for under‑13 features.
• Safety by default, not by setting: teens and kids start in the safest configuration; friction is added to expand access, not to secure it.
• Anti‑grooming architecture: adult‑minor separation by default, restricted DMs, hard blocks on off‑platform contact sharing, and robust real‑time detection tuned for grooming patterns.
• Design detox: end infinite scroll for minors; reduce social comparison metrics; rate‑limit notifications; enforce “lights‑out” quiet hours.
• Data minimization: no behavioral advertising or monetization of minor data, period.
• Accountability with logs: auditable safety pipelines, moderator response SLAs for child endangerment, and mandatory transparency to independent monitors.

This is all feasible. The presence of recent, hurried safety improvements proves it. When platforms roll out age‑estimation, chat restrictions, and new moderation AI after public pressure, they inadvertently make the plaintiffs’ case: safer designs were practicable all along.

The Political Signal

The bipartisan AG front against Meta is instructive. It suggests a rare area of cross‑party consensus: the status quo for kids online is indefensible. It also hints at the likely endgame: a multistate settlement that imposes design constraints industry‑wide. If that happens, watch for a domino effect as AGs turn to other youth‑heavy platforms and demand parity with whatever Meta agrees to. Settlements can become the de facto rulebook even in the absence of federal law.

The Roblox docket may get there differently—through a thicket of state actions and private suits—but the gravitational pull is the same: platforms that serve children will be judged by the safest reasonable design standard, not by growth‑era excuses.

The throughline is simple: democratic societies don’t outsource child safety to engagement metrics. We draw lines. The courts will be drawing them now.