‘I will burn down my school’: Extremist indoctrination via Roblox manifests in PH – report

MANILA, Philippines – A video report on the GMA show Resibo, Sunday, March 15, showed how the Philippine National Police’s (PNP) Anti-Cybercrime Group (ACG) caught a group of students who showed signs of “violent extremism.” 

One of the 7 students caught in the rescue operation was grade 6 student “Tony” (not his real name), who had reportedly made a post online that said “I will burn down my school.” 

The police confiscated the students’ phones, wherein various photos potentially related to extremism were found, including pins with an SS design, pertaining to the Nazi party’s “Schutzstaffel,” the Nazi’s paramilitary group; tactical body armor, gloves, a helmet, and an M16 rifle. 

“Foreign-speaking” individuals were telling the children to procure the items listed to be used in an attack. 

The children were reportedly funneled from the popular game platform Roblox into other digital platforms where they could communicate further. 

In these other platforms, which the show doesn’t specify, the “mind conditioning” happens, according to the ACG. The children are reportedly shown materials involving shootings, executions, beheadings, beatings, and violent accidents. There is also an alleged reward system within the groups, where the children are rewarded for doing tasks by the unidentified individuals. 

The ACG conducted the rescue operation on February 2, 2026. 

In their report, GMA reached out to the developers, Roblox Corporation, which told them they were not yet ready to make an official statement on the matter, but are currently investigating, and will coordinate with authorities.

A March 15 Philstar report said that the attack would have been carried out on February 16 at a school in Calabarzon. One of the seven students was reportedly female. The ACG was able to foil the planned attack after foreign counterparts provided information back in January 13 about Facebook users reportedly planning to attack with firearms, improvised explosive devices, and fire extinguishers. 

Roblox radicalization

Similar cases have already been reported elsewhere in the world. In December 2023, the Guardian reported that in Australia, “children as young as 12 are being targeted by extremists who are infiltrating online gaming platforms, with a rising number of children being investigated for radicalized ideologies.”

That same year, Singapore sounded the alarm for radicalization as well, detaining 3 youths in 2022 and 2023. One of the students was 16 years old, and had joined several Islamic State-themed servers on Roblox. 

Roblox is an effective avenue for such because Roblox is more of a creative sandbox where players create “experiences,” essentially designing their own games. This can be exploited by groups to create environments where youth can be radicalized.

The Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) also noted the platform’s young, impressionable audience: “With over 100 million daily active users (DAU), the platform stands out for how young its audience is: around 56% are under 16, and 20% are younger than 9.” 

“Further, Roblox’s appeal lies in its customizability. It allows users to build their own games, avatars, environments, and interactions, making it ideal for fostering creativity — but also ripe for abuse by actors looking to shape ideology within immersive digital spaces,” it added. 

How? GNET analyzed 350 posts and profiles collected between April and June 2025. Of these, 175 pieces of content were found to be far-right and right-wing extremist material, and another 26 considered as borderline. 

They saw usernames coded as “88” which is code for HH, Heil Hitler because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. It also saw usernames pertaining to Adolf Hitler, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and American mass shooter Elliot Rodgers. 

They also found designs for avatars’ shirts that carry the “Reichskriegsflagge,” a banner with parallel black, white, and red stripes used by the right-wing extremists to “express that they do not consider the Federal Republic of Germany in its current form to be legitimate.” 

Other Nazi references include groups with names such as “white laces,” said to be a reference to the laces of a popular pair of boots worn by right-winger extremists. 

Groups include links to servers on the app Discord, where presumably individuals can continue to communicate. The report also noted that it was easy to find user-created content that “make right-wing extremist and racist narratives ‘playable’” such as experiences called “Racism Tycoon” and “lolocaust” — mocking the history of the Holocaust. 

Usernames denying the Holocaust were also found. 

It concluded: “[Our] findings suggest that children and teenagers may be exposed to identity-based hate and extremist ideas on the platform. In some cases, this could potentially contribute to radicalization processes in young people. To be sure, the mere presence of identity-based hate and extremist material does not necessarily mean it has a considerable impact. However, there is the possibility that some young users on Roblox may be negatively impacted by such material and/or form connections to users who create and share such content.”

“Roblox’s trust and safety challenge, then, is not only about scale, but about how the very architecture of the platform can be prevented from being co-opted for extremist ends,” GENT said.

Roblox has many positive, creative communities such as this example of young Filipino Catholics who brought Cebu’s Sinulog and Fiesta Señor to the platform. But on the other hand, and despite safety guidelines on the platform, there remains significant concern for harmful, potentially influential content that can radicalize young minds, as well as issues on the presence of sexual predators. – Rappler.com