A new report has uncovered a community of Roblox players who digitally re-create and “play” through real-life school shootings.
Known as “Active Shooter Studios,” or A.S.S., the group has attracted hundreds of fans on Roblox with detailed recreations of horrific mass shootings, including Columbine, Uvalde, and Parkland, according to a report published this week by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
The disturbing games are created by anonymous users using Roblox’s in-game tools and browser. In one game viewed by Bloomberg, more than 60 players surrounded a school holding pitchforks, chanting the white supremacist phrase “You will not replace us.” The game has since been removed.
One of A.S.S.’s most popular maps re-creates the 1999 Columbine shooting, allowing players to take on the roles of mass murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Players can maim and dismember others—something nominally prohibited by Roblox’s community standards—fighting to the death or eventually committing suicide when police arrive in the game.
The A.S.S. is part of a darker corner of the internet known as the True Crime Community (TCC), an online subculture where followers idolize serial killers and mass murderers. The Columbine shooting is among the events most romanticized by TCC members.
A Roblox spokesperson told Fast Company, “Roblox is committed to safety and civility, and our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organizations in any way.” They confirmed that steps are taken to remove material and accounts that violate these standards.
“We have a dedicated team focused on proactively identifying and swiftly removing such content, as well as banning the individuals who create it, and we will continue to diligently enforce our policies,” they added.
This is not the first time such re-creations have been found on the platform. The ADL previously discovered re-creations of the 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. Despite Roblox’s efforts, removing these maps often becomes a game of whack-a-mole. According to the report, A.S.S. members have started hosting games on paid Roblox private servers to evade detection.
With over 80 million active users logging onto Roblox daily—many of them children or teens—games that glorify mass violence risk desensitizing players and may serve as a gateway to other extremist content.
However, Roblox insisted “the vast majority” of users on its platform do not seek out A.S.S. content and that it is not easily searchable. “Because of the swift, proactive safety measures we have in place, it is very unlikely users would be exposed to such content on our platform,” the spokesperson said.
“Combatting content that supports extremist views is an internet-wide challenge, as these individuals constantly try to evade detection,” they continued. “We work closely with other platforms and in close collaboration with law enforcement to keep content that violates our policies off our platform.”
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