Ethan Dallas was just 15 years old when he died by suicide. According to a new lawsuit filed by his mother, Ethan was groomed by an adult predator who found him on Roblox at age 12, then moved their communication to Discord.

Over time, the predator coerced Ethan into sending explicit content—and threatened to expose him.

Ethan complied. He was terrified. And in 2024, he took his own life.

Now, his mother is suing both platforms for wrongful death and negligence—and she’s not alone. This is just one of multiple lawsuits alleging that Roblox and Discord failed to protect children from grooming, blackmail, and sexual abuse.

These aren’t obscure platforms. Roblox has over 110 million daily users, many of them underage. Discord is widely used by teens with virtually no identity verification. Both companies claim to prioritize child safety, yet the basic guardrails failed Ethan—and countless others.

We, the undersigned, demand that Roblox and Discord immediately:

• Fund independent safety audits and release the results to the public
  Implement mandatory identity verification for adult accounts
• Strengthen parental controls and make them impossible for minors to disable without approval
• Add real-time grooming detection systems and automatic alerts
  Commit to public transparency about the number of grooming incidents and user reports
   

If these companies can afford to build billion-dollar gaming and messaging empires, they can afford to make them safe. No app should allow a predator to isolate and threaten a child—and no family should have to bury their child because tech companies looked the other way.

What happened to Ethan should never happen again.