A virtual recreation of Nazi Germany has been discovered in one of the world’s biggest online gaming platforms by a 10-year-old Jewish girl in Melbourne, despite parent company Roblox expressing a zero-tolerance policy towards extremist behaviour.
Roblox is a gaming platform of more than 200 million monthly users which, like many virtual reality frontiers, markets itself to children.
It allows users to create their own video games, interact and play games created by others.
The virtual room, designed to resemble Nazi Germany and complete with Third Reich symbols and Nazi soldiers, was discovered by a Jewish primary schooler in Melbourne, who accessed it from a server in Australia.
The great-grandchild of Holocaust survivors, the girl immediately identified the virtual recreation of her family’s history.
“We teach our kids from a young age about what it means to be Jewish, about the Holocaust,” said her father, who asked not to be named for safety reasons.
“It was very confronting. She was distressed, shocked, scared. She knew what they meant.”
“We are Nazis and we are going to take over the world,” one of the players said when she entered the virtual room. “Get away from us and bow down before us.”
A Roblox spokesperson told The Australian the company’s community standards “explicitly prohibit content and behaviour that glorifies or promotes extremism, including depictions, slogans, flags, or icons associated with Nazism”.
Read the article by Chloe Whelan in The Australian.