Tore Hamming
In January 2025, a man named James Wesley Burger used Roblox—a platform designed for creativity and youth engagement—to openly issue threats of ideologically motivated violent extremist attacks. The case illustrates a disturbing trend: extremists appear to exploit Roblox to radicalise, recruit, and mobilise users, raising urgent questions about safety on one of the world’s most popular gaming platforms.
While often described as a game, Roblox is more accurately a platform—a creative ecosystem where developers and users design their own games. Regardless of terminology, it has become one of the most widely used gaming platforms, topping mobile charts and competing with Minecraft and Fortnite for desktop playtime.
Despite being an industry leader in terms of trust and safety and investing considerable resources into platform safety initiatives at a time when most digital platforms otherwise abandon it, Roblox is no longer just a safe creative space for predominantly the youth to enjoy, express, and develop. Recent years have also shown that extremists view Roblox as an attractive platform within the broader gaming universe, likely in part due to its enormous user popularity and design flexibility. Notably, extremists’ preference for Roblox has developed despite the company being one of the most committed gaming companies in terms of trust and safety, highlighting the complex nature of establishing secure and safe social technology platforms.
This Insight discusses how gaming platforms have become attractive digital spaces for extremists, focusing specifically on Roblox and recent cases of extremist exploitation. This builds on a growing body of research showing that extremists across ideologies are building a presence on gaming and adjacent platforms such as Steam, Discord, and, to a lesser extent, Minecraft. While gaps in data remain, trends point to the use of these spaces for propaganda dissemination, recruitment, mobilisation, and potentially, fundraising.
In recent years, intelligence agencies have warned about extremists’ use of Roblox and that they detect a dynamic of younger and younger people becoming radicalised. Similar dynamics have been evident in my own work on how gaming and gaming-adjacent platforms are exploited by extremists, a theme that the GIFCT’s pool of experts are currently scrutinising to provide the public and the gaming companies with a better understanding of the challenge at hand.
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