I’m used to Roblox being almost everywhere, but I wasn’t expecting to see it in a clip of The Kardashians. On the April 14 episode “Burn Them All to the Fucking Ground,” Kim Kardashian became visibly upset after her son Saint supposedly discovered an in-game advertisement that used an image of her crying face. She said the ad was labelled something “super inappropriate” like “Kim’s new sex tape.”
Originally reported by Polygon, Kardashian was hosting a barbeque when her son came to show her some Roblox content. When Saint explained, “That’s not my character. That’s a game,” his mother responded: “Oh, it’s a game? Then we’re suing them if it’s a game with my name and picture.”
While Kardashian called it an ad, it was more likely that her son saw the text description of an in-game “experience.” Experiences are games made by community members, many of whom are children. Roblox content moderators do exist, but they can struggle to keep sexual content off the platform. This is a huge problem since half of the game’s 30 million users are under age 13.
Despite the platform’s zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual content, its mature content lock is not turned on by default. This allows kids to easily stumble upon inappropriate content. And rogue developers have figured out ways to hack Roblox’s safety filters.
A Roblox spokesperson confirmed to Polygon that the text reference existed on its platform. However, they denied that there was ever a sex tape hosted on Roblox. The spokesperson told Polygon that the text reference was removed and that the company “swiftly took down the associated experience and banned the community developer involved with the incident.” Roblox did not return a request for comment in time for publication.
Kardashian was furious about the incident as she had a sex tape surface in 2007. In the episode, she said: “The last thing I want, as a mom, is for my past to be brought up twenty years later. ”