American Society Hates its Kids: Epstein, School Shootings, and Roblox

American society hates its kids.

A strong position, granted, but one that is harder and harder to refute. We have the big things, of course. Jeffery Epstein was given a sweetheart deal despite being a known pedophile. Somewhat less understood about that deal is how much it protected his potential accomplices. The deal stated that the US would not prosecute his “potential co-conspirators”. This did not protect his closest accomplice, Maxwell, but it appears to have protected others in his orbit. And, of course, the Epstein emails reveal that so many of our political, intellectual, and financial elite stood by him even after his plea deal for, again, raping children!

Our societal disdain for children doesn’t stop there, of course. School shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon. No other country is within even an order of magnitude of the US. In 2025 there have been, so far, 288 school shootings in the US. The next closest country, Mexico, has had 8. We stopped caring after Newtown, when the GOP and some Democrats lined up against gun control. Gun control, obviously, works. Every other major industrialized nation has some form of gun control. Mass shootings, for example, tripled after the US’s ban on assault weapons expired. But doing anything to restrict gun use is a non-starter. The dreams of fighting government tyranny (and how is that going, in a country where “papers, please” is now accepted?) like a movie hero apparently outweigh the lives of our kids.

But we fail our kids in lots of little ways, too. We refuse to change Section 230, the law that allows groups like Facebook to use their algorithms to actively harm children for engagement. We drive out teachers by micro-managing them and refusing to allow them to teach. We allow nearly unregulated charter schools to throw away kids that are harder to teach. 34 states allow some form of child marriage to adults. And, of course, we let businesses run roughshod over their best interests. Which brings us to Roblox.

Roblox, for those who do not know, is an online platform that allows kids to play and create online games, as well as chat with and message each other. (Smart, or cynical, people can already see the problem here — private messages are a ripe target for abusers) It has been hit with a huge number of lawsuits, mostly over child sex exploitation, but it is also accused of unfairly profiting off the work of users, especially children. The New York Times interviewed the CEO of Roblox about these issues, and the rot is terrible.

Right off the bat, when asked about child predators on the system, the CEO considered them an opportunity. I am going to reproduce the entire question and answer here, since the bald face statement of what he said sounds so incredible:

Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? …

It is astonishing that I have to type the phrase “child sexual predators are not an opportunity” in response to a CEO who runs a company aimed at children. But here we are. It doesn’t get better, unfortunately.

He talks about how they intend to rely on AI face recognition to determine who is and is not a child and base access, restrictions, etc upon that. Anyone who has followed imitative AI, or even face recognition technology in general (not all of it is based on the same technical foundation as imitative AI, and its not clear that the CEO understands that difference to begin with. But there is no very good facial recognition technology available — certainly not one enough that is accurate enough to be relied upon to protect children, in my opinion). He doesn’t seem to know how many kids are on his platform — the best he can do is say that the majority claim to be above 13. He also praises his AI (which I would bet is just simple text recognition) word filtering but doesn’t want to discuss how easy it is to avoid those filters in messages to kids. He won’t even admit that predators are a problem on his platform:

Newton: (interjecting) You don’t think you have a problem with predators on the platform.

Baszucki: I think we’re doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people on our platform and the hours, in really leaning into the future of how this is going to work.

As a bit of an aside: I have no reached the point were I assume the word innovate or innovation really just means “crimes and irresponsibility”.

And then segues into wanting to teach children that gambling is good. No, really:

Roose: Would you ever put a prediction market inside Roblox — like, let kids bet with their Robux and say, “I bet he’s gonna steal a Tung Tung Tung Sahur?”

Newton: Or, “I bet he’s not gonna Dress to Impress.”

Baszucki: We would — I think we would have to do that — once again, I’ll share some of the complexity. Every single country in the world has different legislation around loot boxes and kid gambling. And so we would have to be — it sounds very fun and obvious. Like, I love that —

Another aside: I give Newton and Roose a lot of grief for their generally “access journalism” style coverage of the tech industry, but they did a nice job of keeping to the important parts in this interview. I do recommend reading the whole thing, because the flavor of it is really horrible. It is clear that the CEO is focused on growth and scale above all. When pressed about the decline in spending on safety on his platform, he leans heavily into the AI aspect of their safety work and refuses to engage meaningfully with the fact that other social media platforms have demonstrated that AI and automation are woefully insufficient for content moderation. At the end of the day, he seems baffled by the idea that his first responsibility is to the kids, not to the investors who want growth.

Of course, we have spent the last fifty yers or so raising the importance of investors and growth above all else. Any restriction on business, especially Silicon Valley based businesses, is bad. They are blows to innovation and the economy and the rights of investors that no decent human being would allow. You cannot, after all, create an economic omelette without breaking a few kids.

American society does not value children. Harsh, but undeniable. Where it does not place the opinions and needs of adults above the welfare of children, it makes their lives and health subservient to the economic interests of massive companies, even those targeted specifically at them. At no point in their lives do we, as a society, put children first. You can judge a society, it is said, by how it treats it most vulnerable. Fewer are more vulnerable than children. America, it seems, does not care.