WASHINGTON — Senators Josh Hawley and Dick Durbin sent a formal investigation letter to Roblox this week, demanding the company explain how explicit content and material linked to child sexual abuse has persisted on a platform it markets to children as young as five. The bipartisan pairing—Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, and Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois—marks one of the most senior Senate challenges the company has faced.
The letter quotes the company's own promotional language back at it. "You trumpet Roblox as a safe digital playground for children as young as five," the senators said. "But the public record raises serious questions about this promise of safety."
The Senate probe follows at least 140 federal lawsuits already filed against Roblox over child safety failures. Those cases allege the platform exposed minors to predatory behavior and harmful content. The volume of litigation, now working through federal courts, gave the senators a documented public record to cite in their letter.
Roblox has responded to mounting legal and regulatory pressure by rolling out age-based account tiers and a facial verification system. The facial verification tool is designed to confirm the ages of users who claim to be adults, separating them from accounts registered to minors. The company has not publicly specified the timeline for full deployment of those systems or the number of accounts already subject to verification.
The Hawley-Durbin investigation is not an isolated action. It follows a sustained Senate push to advance children's online safety legislation and to combat child sexual abuse material distributed through digital platforms. Both senators have previously backed legislation targeting online platforms that host harmful content directed at minors.
Roblox functions as both a gaming platform and a creation engine. Users—many of them children—build and publish their own games within the Roblox ecosystem, which the company hosts. That structure complicates content moderation: the platform is not distributing a fixed catalog of games but an open-ended library of user-generated environments, each of which carries its own safety risks. Critics have argued that model makes consistent moderation nearly impossible at scale.
The platform's user base skews young. Roblox has reported that a large share of its active users are under 13, making it one of the most widely used digital environments among American children. The exact number of U.S. child users was not specified in the senators' letter.
The investigation letter asks Roblox to provide detailed information about its content moderation systems, its processes for detecting and removing child sexual abuse material, and its protocols for responding to reports of predatory behavior. The senators set a deadline for the company's response, though the specific date was not released in the public materials tied to the probe.
For Hawley, the Roblox investigation continues a years-long pattern of targeting major technology platforms over child safety. He has previously pushed for legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media and has been among the most aggressive Senate voices on the issue. Durbin, the Senate's former majority whip and a long-serving Judiciary Committee member, brings institutional weight to the probe—his backing signals the investigation has bipartisan credibility beyond a single senator's press operation.
The 140 federal lawsuits already pending against Roblox represent a separate legal track running parallel to the Senate inquiry. Those cases were filed by plaintiffs alleging direct harm to minors. A Senate investigation carries different tools: it can compel document production, schedule executive testimony and apply public pressure in ways that civil litigation cannot. If the company's response is deemed insufficient, Hawley and Durbin have the standing to escalate to subpoenas or formal hearings.
Roblox has not issued a detailed public response to the Senate letter. The company's stock is publicly traded, and the investigation adds to a documented set of legal and regulatory liabilities the company is managing simultaneously.
